Carpe Diem #1452 cool (suzushi)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I hope you all enjoy this month full of classical kigo for summer (and winter). I enjoy it very much to create these posts every day for you. It gives me the opportunity to dive into the beautiful history of haiku, tanka and other forms of Japanese poetry and it gives me the opportunity to try my hand on classical kigo myself.

Today I have taken a kigo from the sub-division of summer, the season. Our classical kigo for today is cool (suzushi) and it is normally used as a kigo for the summer evening in Japan. I think you all can relate to that, because after a hot summer day it is wonderful to sit down in the garden, on the porch, on the beach on a cool summer evening to cool down.

I found a nice haiku created by my master, Basho, that paints this coolness in a nice way, but without the kigo that we have to use today:

Basho wrote the following haiku in the Summer of 1688.

taneshisa ya   aota ni suzuma   mizu no ato

delightfulness
cooling oneself in a rice paddy
the sound of water

© Basho (Tr. Jane Reichhold)

(In this haiku the word "suzuma" is "cooling oneself")

Cool (suzushi)

Here is a haiku written by myself in which I have used this classical kigo:

chasui ha futtou suru nai fan ni mo suzushi sa wo mitsukeru tame no houhou

tea water boils
no way to find coolness
not even a fan

© Chèvrefeuille

And I ran through my archives and found a nice tanka with the same theme:

seeking for coolness
in the depths of the heart -
Summer romance
laying in the shadows of the pines
cooling down

© Chèvrefeuille

Of course I have also a nice classical kigo of winter for our friends on the Southern Hemisphere. Today that will be: Indian summer (koharu)

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7:00 PM (CEST) and will remain open until June 19th at noon (CEST). I will try to publish our new episode, dripping spring-water (shitatari), later on.