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Banzai, merry company of haijin!

The 7th edition of Mizu no Oto – Every Image Has Its Haiku has come to an end.
This edition was exceptional, because it lasted two weeks instead of one, and because in addition to one of the beautiful photos by @f3nix, I had left you the freedom to be inspired by the Halloween festivities.

Halloween isn’t only spooky masquerades and ghost stories, but also a commemoration of the dead, and a time in which to remember our loved ones who are no longer there, so there wasn’t a silly theme, but one that could be developed in the spirit of wabi, mono no aware and yūgen.

I asked you to break the record, and you were fantastic in answering! Thanks to you, the new record is now 27 participants!

I waited until the second Monday to post the comment under which to vote, so as to be reasonably sure that most of the haiku had already been posted, and then the voters could choose with knowledge of the facts by reading them all, but I cannot say the same satisfied with the result: only 6 of you took the trouble to cast a vote.

Maybe having more time to vote would have changed things, but I will never get tired of saying that here on Bananafish we want to see people interacting with each other, reading and commenting, not just participating in contests.

For this reason, I do not feel I have achieved all the objectives of the 7th edition. The participation record has been beaten, so there will be a bonus Best Haiku Award, sponsored with a donation from my personal account @marcoriccardi, but there will be no bonus Popular Choice Award, nor Best Vote Comment Award.

The next special edition of the contest will be the 10th, and there those who really showed great participation and team spirit will be rewarded.

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Some Info:

• @f3nix has become a moderator of the project Collective Intelligence. He is doing an incessant job to submit your posts to the community and do a very accurate curation. A lot of Finish the Story posts are being appreciated and upvoted by @co-in thanks to this. Do not hesitate to submit your better posts to Collective Intelligence: if they will be evaluated high quality, you may be rewarded!

• If you aren’t yet in our Discord channel, The Bananafish Realms, please subscribe here: https://discord.gg/ZWmEUWT
  We want to give you the warm welcome in the Tribe, and to chat together having a lot of fun!
  
  
  

  

Here are the winners of this special edition!

Best Haiku award (2 STEEM):

@oacevedo

El cielo cubre
su fantasmal museo.
Ronda la muerte.
**
The sky covers
his ghostly museum.
Round the death.

Like many haikus of both the tradition and the modernity, this one has two movements. The first one gives a vivid and impressionistic brushstroke of what the poet witnessed, it represents his epiphany in front of nature, in this case the sky and the ruined villa, seen as a "museum" of ghosts, because evidence of a past that no longer exists. The second one collects and summarizes the experience, giving it a new definition; the image here is about death, that it hovers over the old walls as if it were a night watch (“ronda” in Spanish means both walking in circle and doing a night guard duty).

bonus Best Haiku award (2 STEEM):

@cyemela

Windowless Castle -
Skeleton bones fall adrift
Ghosts from hereafter

This haiku comes out of realism in the second movement, after kireji, to bring us into a spiritual realm, where the passage of time is not linear, but rather reflects the thought and the sensation of the poet in front of the ruins, who thinks of the transience of all things and therefore anticipates the inevitable destiny of death that awaits everyone in the future (ghosts from hereafter).

Popular Choice award (1 SBI share):

@arehany

Cielo otoñal.
En el umbral oscuro
está el miedo.
**
Autumn sky
On the dark threshold
There is fear.

I tell you sincerely, if it had not been voted by you as favorite haiku, I probably would have rewarded this haiku along with the best. I was impressed by its cleanliness and its simplicity. The haikus should have simple, common words, avoid rhetorical artifices and daring constructions. They should transmit feelings of calm, melancholy, subtle joy, mild and detached humor, in short, delicate and measured feelings.
Another thing that I like about @arehany, and that someone else does, is that she writes a short paragraph in prose that explains the context in which every haiku was born. This thing is called haibun and it’s used by so many haiku poets since the master Bashō.

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Our three awesome winners also achieve the right to decorate their footer with this exclusive and beautiful banner by @f3nix:

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The banner is customizable with the name of the winner, an idea given to us by @rebeccabe. Please, contact @f3nix on Discord or via comment if you like this option.

Best vote comment (1 SBI share):

@josemalavem

Since my appreciation, three exercises stand out, especially (I have already given them my vote); they are @arehany, @insight-out and @blueeyes8960. I find it difficult to choose between them, because all three, in my perspective, are very good, but, since I have to select one, I would keep @arehany.
It is a poetic text of great conciseness and expressiveness, which concentrates its proposal in images that account for what is present in photography, but also open up suggestive impressions, in tune with what is requested, that is, the psychological atmosphere linked to Halloween. The poetic gaze rests on what perhaps most attracts the viewer's attention: the sky, which simply qualifies as autumnal; not only for the month, but for what of decadence can be in the environment. Then, he registers what the view also testifies: the dark threshold, to end with the phrase that gives the poem significant strength in the key of the ephemeris: fear.

By rewarding for the second time in a row @josemalavem, I want to give a hint to everybody: this is the kind of comment I’m searching for. It’s structured, it contains a text analysis, it isn’t a mere “I like/I don’t like”. I know, not everyone has the same academic preparation as José, but everyone can explain in their own words the motivations for which a haiku has moved them deep.

Thank you, domo arigato gozaimasu, to the other awesome participants!
@theironfelix, @felixgarciap, @louielowa, @raj808, @insight-out, @gwilberiol, @blueeyes8960, @aurodivys, @tristancarax, @javert68justice, @f3nix, @medusaeffect, @gaby-crb, @stever82, @iamthegray, @agmoore, @calluna, @gracielaacevedo, @marlyncabrera, @acostacazorla, @solperez @oscarina, @brisby
Keep on writing and reading haiku… Edition #10 approaches!

See you very soon for the new edition of Mizu No Oto in an hour!

Your ever-learning Bashō-fish

@marcoriccardi

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[banner credit: @f3nix]