Above the burning
hills: false clouds of smoke. The land
made ready for growth.
A recent prompt from Carpe Diem is a rare kigo, ‘burning the hills’.
On the surface this doesn’t seem very kigoish, but in Japan farmers burn the old grass off the hillsides in preparation for planting – thus it is a kigo of Spring.
The Carpe Diem site has several different challenges. The one I’m trying today is to complete a haiku given the middle line.
The given line is:
mists over the foreign highlands
Extra restrictions are that it must follow the classical form and use one more kigo (season word) for Autumn. ‘Mist’ is a classic Autumn word.
I looked up some kigo words and found them inspirational.
Now it is twilight;
mists over the foreign highlands
hide the harvest moon.
Although we only have to produce two lines, this challenge isn’t easy, but on the Carpe Diem site are links to a number of amazing poems it has inspired.
For all you haiku fans, here’s a link to a new online magazine Kigo: Seasonal Words – available to download free.
It contains four of my haiku, which, of course, makes me really happy, but that’s not why I recommend it. It has 96 other haiku and they are a wonderful collection.
This first issue is a Winter/Spring one, but having a restricted subject matter has not restricted the poets. There are so many ways of looking at a season; many of them I wouldn’t have been able to think of ever. A formal poetry style, a restricted subject, but so much variety.
The human brain has so many manifestations – if all the 8 billion people in the world sat down and wrote a haiku about winter no two of them would be the same. And yet in all that difference almost all those 8 billion people respond to poetry. Behind the diversity is an underlying sharing.
Those who write haiku, tanka or haiga may be interested to know that the publishers, Chuffed Buff Books, are now taking submissions for the summer issue.
e a m harris 