So why did I start writing haiku – I wasn’t a poet and didn’t read poetry. Wait! Haven’t we been here before. I wasn’t a writer either – although I had tried my hand at a couple of creative non-fiction pieces for bird watching magazines. But then a period of enforced rest, after major surgery, got me thinking about life – as you do – it’s transience!
All I could really do was read (I’m not a TV or Netflix person). And think. I’m quite good at thinking. So back to reading Richard Jefferies and thinking about life. In my youth I had walked the same hills, downs, woods and meadows as he had – and sometimes in some quiet corner of a meadow or a wind blown hilltop I could (almost) feel his thoughts.
This then was when I happened upon Colin’s book – Something beyond the Stars (1993). A book of Found Haiku from the Notebooks of Richard Jefferies.
So to help pass the time, I started looking for ‘found’ haiku in some of Jefferies’ other works. This is beginning to feel like it’s turning into a monologue on Richard Jefferies. But I find his books a constant source of inspiration. Many of my haiku have started life in his writings and essays – a pairing of his prose with my haiku; his prose reimagined. So I make no apologies for yet more haiku intuited from his words …
For Richard Jefferies the freedom of a bird’s life was appealing, as was a bird’s ability to live in tune with its surroundings and take delight in the natural rhythms and beauties of the seasons.
[…] “Presently a small swift shadow passes across—it is that of a hawk flying low over the hill. He skirts it for some distance, and then shoots out into the air, comes back half-way, and hangs over the fallow below, where there is a small rick. His wings vibrate, striking the air downwards, and only slightly backwards, the tail depressed counteracting the inclination to glide forwards for awhile. In a few moments he slips, as it were, from his balance, but brings, himself up again in a few yards, turning a curve so as to still hover above the rick.” […]
Wild Life in a Southern County (1879)
Jefferies’ passion for birds shines through his text. His description of a Whitethroat below like no other and probably never equalled. …
[…] “Suddenly he crosses to the tops of the hawthorn and immediately flings himself up into the air a yard or two, his wings and ruffled crest making a ragged outline; jerk, jerk, jerk, as if it were with the utmost difficulty he could keep even at that height. He scolds, and twitters, and chirps, and all at once sinks like a stone into the hedge and out of sight as a stone into a pond.”[…]
The Life of the Fields (1887)
But is there a haiku to be ‘found’ …
bursting through his song a whitethroat
But ‘finding’ haiku, fun and somewhat addictive as it is, isn’t like actually writing haiku – not really, is it.
So back to my reading …
across the meadow – part 6
