Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Carpe Diem #504, Chiyo-Ni (1) ''the dew of the rouge-flower''


Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

July is the month of the ''big-five'', Basho, Chiyo-Ni, Buson, Issa and Shiki. The five greatest haiku-poets ever (at least in my opinion). In earlier posts e.g. Kuheli's Ghost Writer post last month, Chiyo-Ni came along and last year's February (2013) we had CD-Specials with haiku written by Chiyo-Ni in which we had our first encounter with Chiyo-Ni.
This month, July 2014, we will discover more of her great haiku, starting today with this wonderful haiku:

koborete wa tada no mizunari  beni no tsuyu

the dew of the rouge-flower,
when it is spilled
is simply water


© Chiyo-Ni

Chiyo-Ni, a contemporary of Buson, started writing haiku when she was young. First she was inspired by the haiku of Basho, but later on in her life she created her own style. Chiyo-Ni has that eye for the tiny little things in nature, but she especially was caught by the beauty of flowers (especiaaly the Morning Glory, on which she composed several haiku, which will surely come along this month).

Rouge Flower

Ok ... back to Chiyo-Ni's haiku for today. The Rouge flower (a kind of daylily) is a reddish-yellow flower it is cup-shaped and holds rain or dew in the same way as the Camellia. There is great ''virtue'' in the expression tada no. If we translate it ''only'' water, we got the feeling of disillusionment without the insight into the nature of things.
This haiku by Chiyo-Ni is one of my favorite haiku written by her and I think it will inspire you all to write new haiku. Maybe ... in the same spirit as Chiyo-Ni ... we will see. (PS. I don't know for sure if the photo above is a Rouge Flower, I couldn't retrieve a photo of a Rouge Flower as I gooled on ''rouge flower'', so if you know which flower is meant ... please let me know.)

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until July 5th at noon (CET). I will try to post our next episode, a haiku by Buson, later on. For now ... have fun, be inspired and share your inspired haiku with us all.


4 comments:

  1. I left information on my post, the rouge flower might be a lotus.

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  2. The idea of "only water" is very intriguing. I think that distilling something down to the "only" is a wonderful subject for haiku.

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  3. She loved the morning glory, of which there are many varieties.....I do like her poems....

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  4. Here is another link to a possible connection to 'rouge flower'.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphaea_caerulea

    Blogitorloseit also has an interesting link here:
    http://www.jcia.org/n/en/info/b/
    About the safflower which was used as rouge.

    ReplyDelete