Two Girls with Oleando - Klimt

Learn a spiritual practice in Just Three Lines

 

Saving the bat

Tiny, brown, Yoda ears

To be born again

.

Back in 1973 I pricked up my ears when my 11^th grade English teacher, Eleanor Moore, introduced the concept of the Japanese form of poetry called haiku as an assignment.

 

Just three lines? Only seventeen syllables? Well, that should be easy! Not!

 

Capturing a transcendent moment in time and implying the timeless is far from easy. In addition, you need to make some sort of passing reference to the time of year, the ‘season’ word of classical Japanese haiku. While we may vary from the 5-7-5-syllable pattern over three lines one never strays from the seventeen-syllable totality. None of those English language poetry tricks like metaphor, the ‘likes’ and ‘as’, the alliteration or rhymes. These are simply dispensed.

 

I have to thank my English teacher for that introduction. Haiku, popularized by Beat poets like Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, had only really reached American shores in the post-war cold war era. Since then I have tinkered with any number of poetry forms but haiku is the one that I keep returning to for soul sustenance.

 

In the mornings I take my notebook and ponder the one moment, nature, transcendence. Then I write a three line, seventeen syllable poem, hoping that I honor the integrity of that moment, that witnessing. 

 

In this way I have evolved both a literary and spiritual practice. It’s a discipline. I witness the long spells of downright depressing ‘weather that has us forgot’ as well as the heart-stopping flashes that nature reveals like the aurora borealis or the constellations spread out before me on a sharp and clear winter night. 

 

The haiku above was written this morning. Twice now one of our cats has brought in a Brown Long-eared Bat. Conversations with our local Conservation Ranger have evolved into creating a cardboard box bat CPR unit.  

 

That’s not in the poem or the part of the spiritual practice. The witnessing of nature is part of the practice. I witnessed the bat inside the house. Then it spoke to me, not literally, but bat symbolism came to me. Bats in European culture are symbols of rebirth, while in China they represent the Five Blessings of Buddha.

  When I have five ‘bat events’ that may trigger another haiku.

  I do write other things, other types of poem, non-fiction, even the occasional bit of fiction. The haiku is the daily discipline that feeds and anchors my soul in the here and now of the natural world and its numinousness. 

 

© Bee Smith 2008

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