This is an informal session in which a panel of haijin chat about what makes or breaks a haiku according to each of them, with examples, of course. After the panel speaks the audience is welcome to ask questions or add their own comments.
We hope to have an open relaxed discussion, learn something new and spend an enjoyable evening with haiku.
Due to the personal schedules of the editors, Cafe Haiku is taking a summer break for a month or so. We have been at it for five years putting up about two posts a week. We finished our 500th post, a big milestone for us and only possible because of your support. Thank you.
Don’t worry, we have plans and will be back to open a new submissions window and organise some online sessions too. Wish you all a happy summer, lots of writing and see you soon.
leaving the hospital following me home a sickle moon
The Cityscapes series ends here. A very big thank you to everyone who participated by sending us your excellent work, or by reading and commenting. Happy writing!
Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence. ― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
At Jorasanko, we enter Thakur Bari, the ancestral home of Shri Rabindranath Tagore. The lawn has just a dash of the warm February sun and a few young girls and boys sit around. The building with its red oxide exteriors, cream-yellow borders, and green window-shades is mesmerisingly Kolkata.
inner courtyard – hearing the call of an unseen bird
I wander the rooms in a trance. To be so close to the living space of someone I have admired, someone whose works I have studied and someone whose book of poetry I have been named after, is overwhelming. The dining area is well-preserved, his bedroom is pristine and the little bits of framed poems bring the man to life. I feel a strange connect to this wise figure. It’s precisely then that I happen to enter the room where Gurudev had taken his final breath. There is no one else here now. I stand in the emptiness.
sudden shuffle of feet— somewhere a guard yells “No photos!”
The guttural coo of a pigeon brings me back to the walls lined with the photos of his last journey. A sea of mourners had made it difficult for his son to reach the funeral on time, a plaque says.
hushed silence each brick holds the story together
At the gallery, a uniformed watchman asks people to maintain a line. Suddenly, he decides to give the guests a guided tour of the gallery, instead. A family of 6 asks him questions in Bengali. He animatedly answers the group with enthusiasm.
a clock strikes 4 the conversation dissipates for chai
As I make my way out a couple of hours later, a strange sense of having been there earlier lingers with me. I dismiss the thought.
I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung. ― Rabindranath Tagore
The next day, unexpectedly, I am introduced to a doctor. And he asks me to wait for a few minutes. He reemerges with a little book for me – his translations of poems by Tagore. Some places will always live in us. The songs will be sung.
Our shape shifter cat leaves a line of lint on my work shirt. A mark of ownership. Fingers sinking into her plush persian fur are met with a tremor rippling through the curled up form. Shadowed soon after by a little rumble.
snack-song the soft tinkle of escaped kibble
The neighbor’s indie kitten inveigles herself where no cat has ever been after Faye’s mother. Into her heart. Armed with switch blades for claws and her Maker’s free-hand mask of Zorro, she is a speedy little super brat, everready for a scrap. Until the delivery man appears at the door.
Death
leftovers a crow picks one cheeseball over another
Faded orange square tiles with a black border, lead to a small desk and working area. An old Nateshwar statue in a tandava pose adorns a niche to the left. The wall opposite almost fittingly, hosts a goggle-eyed papier mache Ganeshji and a large film poster entitled TERRORIST. Followed shortly after by open faced cabinets neatly filled with books. Two novels bear the name of the lady with the shock of frizzy, silver hair, who has requested me to see her aged labrador. The crossed, weak hind limbs and weeping, fast growing shoulder mass look ominous. In the garden outside, large sunlit lianas abzorb a symphony of bird song that does not reach their ears.
vacant gaze her daily fix bleeds black
Rebirth
carousel picking up the pieces yet again
There is something endearing about those lips puckered in plain sight. A hand easily rests around each other’s waist. And the eyes with a depth of feeling reserved for each other.
same tree, new shoots little shoes scuff up the playground
Allusions to Bashō apart, it’s really the broad, multi-laned. pothole-free roads of the deep south that call to me. For they take me to the red sands of the theris, the banana orchards on the side road leading to my ‘ancestral’ village, the little granite kundrams with their little granite temples, the winking elephant at the Tirunellaiappar complex, the smell of hot filter coffee and paruppu vadais at the roadside stalls, mixed with the sounds of the speeding, honking TNSTC buses, and the gentle ripples of the Tamraparni, as she turns golden in the light of the setting sun… and I live these tiny moments over and over again as the trucks rumble by my Mumbai (well, Thane) house, turning them into core memories that will go with me to my pyre.
dawn chorus the clink clink clink of coffee vessels
blackout the stars light up one by one
between loose tea and garam masala the shop’s mandir
yellow gulmohar on the cars and the road and the rubbish heap
on the old dust of the tyre-less Fiat red gulmohar
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