Squall
man made boundaries
would have us turn away
from the sea
This is my entry to https://steempeak.com/haikucontest/@bananafish/mizu-no-oto-every-image-has-its-haiku-edition-31-english-1558051204
It's the very first one I wrote and I it comes closest to saying what I am trying to say.
Below are, in the order I wrote them, my further attempts. I just kept adding them on, and I wish I had put more of the weather in, which I feel is a storm brewing.
I also like the ones in bold below.
As you will see if you read them all, I myself got caught up in man's constructs and turned from the sea.
I find that interesting.
Thank you for reading.
from the sea's roar
humans think
cement and stone
can tame the sea
geometry
battles the sea
The endless sea
invites in the folly
of finite geometry
some people
prefer geometry
to power. come in!
the sea laughs
at the human folly
of geometry
Man prefers
geometry
to power
face the power
not the angles
of geometry
why do humans
prefer geometry?
turn to face true might
earth and sea
give a gloomy glare
to geometry
earth and sea
glare gloomily
at geometry
man's geometry
can not tame the sea
or stop the squall
I love the way you think and see things! I like the way you spin one haiku,
man made boundaries
would have us turn away
from the sea
then another, and another, all on the same thing, yet each one escalating or adding another dimension. The final one is emphatic and sounds true:
man's geometry
can not tame the sea
or stop the squall
Oh I am so happy you read the whole thing! Otherwise it's just another so-so haiku. These two are good together, as you have put them, and hit all the points I was trying to hit. But I didn't manage to condense it all into one haiku and the deadline looms (something about rome time) so I put it out as is.
I wonder if this would qualify as a haibun, a story accompanied by a haiku as I understand it.
hm...
I'd say yes - "this would qualify as a haibun, a story accompanied by a haiku" - not that I know anything about haiku or haibun. The story: man prefers power to geometry. Or was it geometry to power. Math is God - that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. The periodic table of elements looks like Lego blocks to me. God is a builder. Matter is made of up tiny Legos. Math is elegant and beautiful and more true than love or words. RIght? Just don't ask me to haiku that idea....
There you go with Pythagorus again - Math is God. i mean, I love the stuff, you know I do, and it can send me into the infinite, but I don't worship it as our good friend Pythy did.
For me the photo depicts man's preference, against evidence of the absolute might of the ocean and the earth, his/her/their math, their human constructs. Man is not God however much some of us like to think so. That's what I was trying to fit into words to go with the photo.
Now I wish we'd had this conversation before I posted! I don't think I was clear enough to write a good haiku. It takes clarity and a connection with the divine to distill a complex idea into a few syllables. I particularly love this contest because it suggests that the standard 5/7/5 construction of a haiku is TOO MANY SYLLABLES for a haiku in English.
Here's the very first haiku I ever wrote, for my sixth grade teacher who didn't like me much after I answered her question "What's the best selling book of all time?" with something by Jean Harlow, which my mother was reading at the time. (Correct answer: Bible) I used "mere" here to mean "any body of sea water"
in the mere of blue
lies the beauty of the sky
and the wake of day
Omg I love your first haiku!!! To be only in sixth grade and use "mere" like "lake" (King Arthur language) is phenomenal. What a great haiku!! Seriously, I think it's flawless and profound. And I see no reason you can't keep going with the geometry haikus, rewriting if need be, but what is posted is posted, and what transpires from there will transpire.
Just to show you how little I really know of poetry, this is news to me: "the standard 5/7/5 construction of a haiku is TOO MANY SYLLABLES for a haiku in English." But I tell ya what, that explains a lot! (Me, haiku-ing: i don't even try.) And now:
What is this heresy about math and Pyth?
In sixth grade (about 600 years ago) I saw Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land. Truly, I saw God in that film more than I had ever seen God in the Bible. Honestly, you know Pythagoras better than I do. I've read Pyth memes but have not read whole books of Pythagorean theorems.
When I say I saw a Donald Duck film in sixth grade, I mean the teacher wheeled in a cart with a giant projector and two metal circles (spools) where we could see and hear the film, like scotch tape, feeding from one reel to the other. I was so in awe of the mechanics of it, I could forget to to watch the movie. Unless it was my favorite, the steel mill and lumber mill films. Every documentary of the second half of the 20th Century was narrated by the same guy, I swear. That authoritative voice, full of knowledge, but even more so, full of enthusiasm and reverence for the industry of human beings who built things and invented stuff. Our offspring live in no such world. Today industry is reviled as the cause of Climate Change. Back then, America was golden, a land of opportunity, and people (for the most part, men) were doing awesome things. And I dreamed of a career in medicine, but lacked the math brains for it. But I digress. Let us say your geometry haikus speak to me and never mind the disilusionment that 21st C science shows us. I grew up with Star Trek-- on a black and white TV! "Beam me up, Scottie" was my secret prayer. That tractor beam would aim at little Carol on planet Earth and pull her up to Dr. Spock and Captain Kirk and a universe of space traveling. *Hey, for all you know, it happened to people who claim to have been kidnapped by UFOs but got left here on Earth; consider all the missing people of the world; who's to say they weren't swept up the way I dreamed of being? Mom's Bible said the day of the Rapture, all believers would go up at once and all infidels Left Behind, which became a book and movie series. Boy do i ever digress.
And boy do I love it when you do! You really prefered the lumber mill films? got a thing for saws do you? Or are you from the pacific northwest?
Farm in the midwest - but factories fascinated me. The industry, the automated machinery, the magic of manufactured goods parading past on an assembly line. As a young adult, I shocked traveling companions by begging to stop at factories-- the Coors factory in Denver was the only one I got to see. Not the mint. :( But in childhood, thanks to field trips, I saw a Pepsi factory and Colonial Bakery. Everything was colossal, clean, running smoothly, magically churning out bottles of soda or sliced bread in plastic bags. All right, it's true, I didn't get out much. My dad is a farmer and he used to build houses (as a hobby! little saltine-cracker-box ranch houses) and put up grain bins. I love the beep-beep of big trucks backing up, the smell of diesel, of engines hard at work. I prefer the smell of hay and horses to any bottled cologne. Or freshly mowed lawn. And now it's time to head outside again. What am I doing in the house?? It's a beautiful day in May!
I know I have always been able to recall the haiku, which I think attests to its value.
As for math vs the divine, it is an age old question, egg or chicken kind of matter, but did God make math or is math a human construct? I think it is the second, nothing more than a language man developed so that we could better describe the ineffable, the imperfect, by trying to tie it down to perfection. Problem is, math resides in perfection and 'reality' never quite makes it. Pythagorus was dreaming.
I kind of like these three one after the other, thanks for giving me that idea. This reads to me like a math proof.
man's geometry
can not tame the sea
or stop the squall
man made boundaries
would have us turn away
from the sea
Man prefers
geometry
to power
Ergh! My keyboard is wonky again! I just had it fixed! so please imagine that the three haikus are bolded and italicized.
Ooh, a triple header haiku! Love it! And yes, I see it too:
"This reads to me like a math proof."
man's geometry
can not tame the sea
or stop the squall
man made boundaries
would have us turn away
from the sea
Man prefers
geometry
to power
It is extremely interesting that you have made your whole creative process known.
The haiku in its final form is very deep, and reading all the progressive approaches, which seem to me like sculpting a block of stone to obtain a shape, makes me understand that it was the best choice
Oh I am so happy to hear that! I often wonder if what is interesting to me will be interesting to anyone else. Hitting "publish" is an act of faith in myself.
And yes! Exactly! Writing haiku, for me, is a lot like carving stone, reducing the mass down to an essential thing.
I have a question: is my post a haibun?
"the sea laughs
at the human folly
of geometry" - True! I think the entire nature laugh at us!
Thanks for reading them all!