Mizu No Oto, Edition #41, English

[photo by @marcoriccardi]

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sodden night
empty village "square"
closing time

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This is my entry to @bananafish's wonderful haiku contest Mizu No Oto.
https://steempeak.com/@bananafish/mizu-no-oto-every-image-has-its-haiku-edition-41-english

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Boy did I ever have a hard time with this one! I tried a new process to write a haiku, that of spending so much time with the "prompt" that a haiku suddenly spills out.

I spent hours looking at that photo, examining what I saw and felt, what I would feel, hear, smell, do and think were I there. I saw the colors and wondered if the green were green because the lights were near grass, but the blue is blue because it's in water, or were the lights actually green or blue bulbs? I imagined it was so silent because it was a movie set about to erupt in action. I wondered if it were real at all, or not some tiny replica of a village in a museum somewhere.

A few haiku did make a tortuous journey onto post it notes, but none of them captured any aspect of the photo, or were poetically pleasing in any way. Here are a few:

skaters must come
make this virtual stonehenge
thunder and thrum

too dark and wet
for skaters to come
thunder and thrum

virtual stonehenge
where are your worshippers?
too wet to skate

In other words, meh. As you can see, I was stuck on what sk8ters would do with the place, and none of those haiku had a darn thing to do with the photo.

It was the last day for this contest. I had to come up with something. In desperation, I went back to the contest post for guidance.

If you are entering this contest, I highly recommend reading the contest post in its entirety for each edition. There are many aspects of haiku that are defined there for every edition, but often one aspect of haiku is examined more deeply. This edition had a guide for western writers of haiku which I found hightly instructive! For instance, I learned that the problem with the haikus above is that I was channeling too much the imagination of the reader. True! Totally true! But more importantly, I learned that what I needed to do for this photo was not say too much.

As soon as I finished reading the contest post, a haiku really truly popped out, quotation marks and all. It was pretty late at night, and I had shut off my computer when it made itself known. I scratched it down on a napkin so I would remember it in the morning, and here it is:

I woke up in the morning and still liked it. That's my final answer. Thank you for reading my work!

All images are my own unless otherwise stated.

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