"this beach of pebbles"

The poem below received a mention in the sixth edition of the SGP (Sharpening the Green Pencil Contest). It can be considered as a model of bouncing the ordinary life towards the area of allegory.

this beach of pebbles
after the wave
my life rearranged

Gregory PIKO
Yass, AUSTRALIA

I think the focus is on this – “this beach of pebbles”. This very beach I contemplate and recall now. This beach which reveals something unexpected and fascinating to me. This very beach which I propose to you as an object of admiration and meditation. The colloquial language knows how to say, elliptically and concisely, just what there is to say. It does not charge the text with details and descriptive adjectives. That is enough and also very expressive, it calls you over there, to see, to feel and to understand the situation.

The text continues as laconic as before, and, finally, skids more than suggestively, from what the wave really does - it draws the pebbles and leaves them in a new, different order - towards an effect that is entirely implausible – it (re)orders the author’s life (or the reader’s, if he also consents to this revelation). Through this simple substitution of the image of the relentless change of the pebbles’ ordering, moved away by the waves at the same time with human life, what we see is a teaching, and the text acquires the aesthetic value of a haiku.

Revelation, in the human sequence, is actually an assumption under the sway of an image that becomes a vision. There is no disorder, any change under the incessant assault of the waves of life is another unexpected and wondrous order. Thi wave is only the moment when someone has understood and has reconciled with his fate. The pebbles have long known this. And were always saying it, but in vain. The poem tells it to us without insisting, it gives us only food for thought. It draws our attention to the fact that it's already happened to someone.

(Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)

Romanian Monthly Kukai March 2017

Theme: using the word freesia

Special Prize

rainy day -
withered on the windowsill
a freesia

(Sabina Ciobanu)

First Prize

fuss on a freesia -
a ladybug
makes the sun wobble

(Mihai Pascaru)


Second Place

cool at dawn -
shaking on a freesia
dew drop

(Lucretia Horvath)


Third Place

anniversary -
on the dry freesia
moonlight

(Julia Ralia)


Fourth Place

freesia bouquet -
never forgotten the perfume
of the first date

(Dan Iulian)


Fifth Place

in-between perfusions -
a yellow freesia
changing the colour

(Doina Bogdan Wurm)


Sixth Place

a white freesia
under the burning candle -
my prayer

(Adina Enachescu)


Basarab train station -
the only valuables
a couple of freesia

(Giannis Kourtis)


cloudy sky -
the rainbow tamped into
the basket of freesias

(Luminita Ignea)


withered freesias -
my childhood home
alone at twilight

(Ioana Bud)

Pollen

pollen before the wind –

grandma’s door again

with a golden handle

Cristina Pârvu

Pollen is a subtle and fruitful matter. A golden powder being carried by a faceless and bodiless being towards a stigma miraculously apt to perpetuate life and liveliness.

In the natural slippage of suggestions, it cumulates the almost magical prestige of all golden things. The reality that the poem evokes is a rich one, in which the tale is intertwined with the real world. The golden doorknob reopens the realm full of fabulous promises of the beginnings.  

Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu

kigo - a rigorous template?

cold wind still
under my coat – in the nostrils only
flying petals

Seasons and time are not made according to the rigorous template that the kigo’s maniacs wish to impose. Spring and winter are fighting long before a definite decision. It is natural that some haiku glorify moments of apotheosis for seasonal words, and others to let them face the natural indecision of the weather and of the world.

One who enjoy the facts and also the genuine atmosphere of real haiku moments has no choice but to evoke them as they happen to be. And to enjoy them equally.

As for the poem, it avoids involving the author and it leaves what you can feel up to anyone. One can say that the wind is still tolerated, while the nostrils already aspire to and are somehow satisfied with just the fragrance of what is to come.

poem and comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu