Carpe Diem #618, Peace

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I hope you all are well and I hope you all have a lot of inspiration for our next (regular) prompt, peace. As you have read in the new "Sparkling Stars" episode, which I published earlier today, Sara McNulty has won our first edition of the Carpe Diem Sea Shell Game. I hope to do another edition of this Sea Shell Game next year, but before that I will have another kind of contest. I am busy with preparing our first Carpe Diem Kukai in which you can submit an all new haiku written on a given theme. As all entries are in I will make a list of the haiku (without names) and will email it to all of you. Than you have the opportunity to be the juror yourself. You have to give points to a haiku and finally I will make up the balance to pronounce the winner. This will be fun I think, but more about our first Carpe Diem Kukai later, I think at the start of 2015 I will have the Kukai ready. Be patient ...

As you know we have all modern kigo (seasonwords) extracted from Jane Reichhold's "A Dictionary of Haiku" in which she has gathered all modern themes for the seasons and today our prompt comes also from that list of modern kigo, peace. As I do in every episode I first share a few haiku by Jane Reichhold which she has given as an example for the modern kigo. So today I have a few wonderful haiku on peace for you.

packing

arms of the flannel shirt
holding on to peace

smoothed by seas
a nearly round rock
points homeward

home again
raking in the Zen garden
the oldest pattern

© Jane Reichhold

All wonderful haiku I think and as you all can see these haiku are not really following the classical rules for the syllables. This is a style which I learned to know as Kanshicho, but recently I discovered that there were in ancient times two kinds of writing haiku, teikei (fixed form) and jiyuritsu (free form).

Traditional haiku consist of 17 "on", in three phrases of five, seven and five "on" respectively. Among contemporary poems teikei (fixed form) haiku continue to use the 5-7-5 pattern while jiyuritsu (free form) haiku do not. 

Although the word "on" is sometimes translated as "syllable," one "on" is counted for a short syllable, two for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one for an "n" at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word "haibun," though counted as two syllables in English, is counted as four "on" in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n); and the word "on" itself, which English-speakers would view as a single syllable, comprises two "on": the short vowel o and the moraic nasal n̩. Conversely, some sounds, such as "kyo" can be perceived as two syllables in English but are a single "on" in Japanese.

The word "onji" ("sound symbol") is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English, although this word is no longer current in Japanese. In Japanese, each "on" corresponds to a kana character (or sometimes digraph) and hence "ji" (or "character") is also sometimes used as the count unit. (Source: Wikipedia)

As I stated in several earlier posts "I think our Western languages aren't suitable with the Japanese "onji"-count of 5-7-5, or the teikei way of writing haiku. The jiyuritsu way of writing haiku does, in my opinion, perfectly well in Western languages".

Well ... enough about the rules. Basho once said: "Now you know the rules, forget them immediately". And that's what I am saying too. Haiku must be fun they must come straight from the heart and soul, because than haiku brings a lot of joy and peace.

© Chèvrefeuille

silent devotion

monks sweeping the garden

coming to peace

© Chèvrefeuille

Wow ... what a wonderful haiku ... so strong and in balance with our prompt for today, peace.

This episode will be open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until December 7th at noon (CET). I will (try to) publish our next episode, the Oak moon (the full moon of December), later on. For now ... have fun!

Carpe Diem "Sparkling Stars" #14,

!! I hope to post our regular episode later on today. I hope to have it created and online on time !!

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Another week has gone by and it's time for a new (bi-weekly) episode of Carpe Diem "Sparkling Stars" in which I share haiku ("sparkling stars") of classical and non-classical haiku poets. This week I have a surprise for you all I think.
For this "Sparkling Stars" I have a wonderful haiku to share with you. This haiku is the winner of our first Sea Shell Game 2014.
It wasn't easy to find the winner of our Sea Shell Game and I love to tell you first how I have done this.

First I wrote all the entries (12 haiku) on pieces of paper, which I put into a little box. I shook the pieces for a while and took one after another from the box. The first haiku I placed against the second haiku pulled out of the box and so on. In that way I had six pairs of haiku.
I studied all pairs for a while and used the following points to make my choice:

1. Is there a kigo in the haiku?
2. Did the writer use a kireiji (cuttingword, mostly interpunction or a natural stop)?
3. Is there a deeper layer hidden in it?
4. The overall image.

I did the same after the first shift, which brought me six haiku in three pairs. In that second shift I again looked at the above mentioned points to make these six haiku back to three haiku.
The third shift was the most difficult, because I had to choose from three haiku.
In the last shift there were two haiku to choose from ... in this shift I looked again and again to the both haiku with the above points and finally I decided to make my choice ... which I talked about with a good friend of mine. A friend with no haiku experience, he had just to look at the both haiku and tell me which he liked the most. He chose the following haiku and I must say ... he had a very good taste ...

The winner of our first Sea Shell Game is ... drum roll ... Sara McNulty of Purple Pen In Portland and here is her winning haiku:

Ocean tide ebbs
Sand glistens with sea treasures
Lucent blue beach glass

© Sara McNulty

I think this haiku is a beauty and I think this haiku is a great winner of our first Sea Shell Game. I will thank you all for being part of this Sea Shell Game and maybe ... maybe ... next year we will have another Sea Shell Game ... you never know.

Congratulations Sara ... I will create a haiga from your haiku and will send it to you by e-mail.

Now ... back to this episode of "Sparkling Stars" ... you have to write an all new haiku (or tanka) inspired on the haiku by Sara McNulty, our Sea Shell Game winner. So be inspired and share your haiku (or tanka) with us all.

Here is my attempt to write an all new haiku inspired on the haiku by Sara.

walking along the beach
following the tracks of a hermit crab -
Ah! That salty air

© Chèvrefeuille

This episode of Carpe Diem "Sparkling Stars" is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until next Thursday December 11th at noon (CET). Have fun!

Carpe Diem "Just Read ..." #5, "Building an excellent birdcage" by Jane Reichhold

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I have a wonderful article for you, just to read. This time it's an article written by Jane Reichhold titled "Building An Excellent Birdcage". I ran into this article at the website of the New Zealand Haiku-Society. This article is about Basho and how Basho can help you to learn how to write haiku. All the used haiku are haiku by Basho translated by Jane.
I think it's a wonderful article and I wish you all a lot of reading fun. Maybe you can used it for your own growth in haiku composing ... that's what I hope of course.
!! I have asked Jane for permission to use this article !!

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Building an Excellent Birdcage by Jane Reichhold

All the haiku used in this article are by Matsuo Basho and were translated by Jane Reichhold.

Jane Reichhold

clouds of fog
quickly doing their best to show
one hundred scenes

What is poetry?

The art of poetry is such a hard thing to describe. Everyone is looking for a way to put words to something that is larger than words, more alive than thought, and longer lasting than any one poem. Poetry is the art of piling up dissimilar images to create an idea that has no exact name.
Picture this. A woman is standing at an open window. Just staring into space, a bit unfocused, lost in a world of thoughts and ideas. Suddenly a small, brown bird alights on the window sill. She knows she should carry the bird out the door and let it go but before she does, she has to do one more thing.
She builds a cage out of words. A cage she can share with others. The work on the cage goes on for days, maybe it is even years until the cage comes under the eyes of another person. In that moment, when the cage of words enters another's mind, it begins to expand. It breaks up into thought - images created by the reader. Through the maze, and amazement of the reader, two cupped hands come forth.
The woman relaxes and lets the bird go. Now its dry feathery weight is in the man's palm. What does it look like? What is it like? Slowly he makes a tiny finger-crack window in his hand and he sees the same eye staring at him that stared at the woman a long time ago when it stood on her window sill. With a flurry of feathers, that shed a magic rarely found, the bird flies back into the sky. It is impossible not to say, "Ah ha!"
So that is what haiku is all about. How to build the cage of words to hold the miracle safe and full of sound until the images in a reader's mind open the door to the wonderment and delight the author found in one part of the world. It is the cage that will attract and intrigue the reader, but it must also be well-built enough to bring the experience intact across time and space. Part of what makes haiku so interesting is that in learning how to read it you have to learn how to build these images.

old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water

You read "old pond" and you instantly imagine some old pond - and everyone's old pond in different.
"a frog jumps into" and your mind sees a frog, jumping left or right or straight ahead and every one of us imagines a different frog.

And then comes the kicker in the last line "the sound of water". What does he mean? It jumps into its own sound? But it does, and if you can imagine the frog jumping then you will be able to hear that sound.

So haiku, as you can see, make excellent cages. They are the perfect size for carrying our deepest experiences. Not big and clumsy with too many words. Not with thick bars of old ideas and abstract thinking. Haiku are alive. Like a cage made of living branches, they support and nourish the art of poetry until it arrives - safe and alive - in the mind of the reader. You're not going to teach anybody anything with your haiku - you're going to show them the experience.
I believe that every person has the ability to be a poet, whether you think you can or not. Some of you may suspect this about yourselves because of an undefined yearning - a place within you that you cannot scratch or reach. Perhaps some times this yen sublimates into a joy in words, a delight in the melodies of dialect, or in other forms of writing. Often it manifests in an interest in reading poetry by others. Or it can come in the simple desire of noticing a beautiful thing and wishing to hold on to the feeling it gives you.

Credits: Frog pond

You don't need talent, you just need to do it, and do it and do it, and enjoy it ... and to do it some more. If you go back to poetry that you have written and been unhappy with, go to the best and most interesting part of it and I can almost guarantee that there will be a haiku right there.
You can be a poet if you really want to be and to the degree you want to be, and I believe Basho can show you how. He can at least show you how to write haiku.
Learning to write haiku has advantages for learning to write anything. This was his final poem ...

clear cascade
scattered on the waves
green pine needles


and its revision ...

clear cascade
no dust on the waves
the summer moon

Being a poet will make your life richer

If you allow yourself to write haiku your life will change. I guarantee you that. Haiku writing is different to any other kind of writing because it demands that you change the way you act, the way you look at the world and think.
It begins where you are - in the present. Kierkegaard said that the unhappy man has no present, and I think much of our unhappiness lies with old memories that are painful and fears of the future, but if you come to this moment, this place where you are and think about your uncomfortable chair or the temperature of the room, and accept them, that helps everything.
Haiku are brief and that makes them easy to write because you don't have the chance to make that many errors. You always write them in the present tense, keeping them simple, keeping them brief and using common words, not fancy ones.
The other good thing about haiku is that it will connect you to the world outside - one of the ways of learning to write haiku is to take a walk. You will see things, things will call out to you and you will suddenly see something different that you've never seen before or you'll see a relationship between the rolling surf and a cloud above; or you'll see something odd and you'll watch and your whole focus will leave your body and go to what you're watching.
And that is the most freeing thing you can do. I think you live longer if you can do that. We'll see.

first blossoms
seeing them extends my life
seventy-five more years

First Cherry Blossom (© Chèvrefeuille)

The question of syllables

Many people think haiku are not real haiku unless they have 17 syllables - but this does not have to be. In Japan if you're counting the sound units there should be 17, but English syllables and Japanese sound units are different. The sound units are much shorter, and so if you would write a 17-syllable haiku it would come out about one-third too long. For instance, if you say "Tokyo" it has 3 syllables, but in Japanese it has 4 sound units.
When the Japanese tried to translate English haiku into Japanese they ended up with big, clunky poems and way too many words. So we've taken the idea of using short-long-short lines and this conforms to the haiku form, but it allows us a little more freedom in how many words we use. Also, in Japanese instead of having a full stop or a comma or a dash they have a word for the break the punctuation creates, and those words take up a couple of sound units so that's another way of shortening it.

Modern haiku writers think you should not count English syllables when writing haiku and this allows a lot of freedom - you can forget about those particular bars of the cage.

Should haiku be written in English?

There's an old idea that haiku cannot be written in English. In the 1960s RH Blyth wrote: "Women cannot write haiku." So, here I am. Earl Miner wrote a book about Basho's renga and said it's an interesting form and a beautiful thing to study ... but we shouldn't try it in English. And this is still the attitude in a lot of universities where they start with the idea you're taught haiku in the 2nd grade (aged 8), therefore it's something for elementary school.
Well, you learn addition and subtraction in the 2nd grade too, but that doesn't stop you from studying calculus and algebra. And the same is true for haiku. The more you know about the form the more there is to learn.
I would like to see haiku, or Japanese genres, taught in universities because I feel there is so much more to be learned. In the 1920s when poets first began to be exposed to translations, like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, they got this idea of how important it is to work with images instead of abstract ideas, and so they began to use these methods with their own poetry.
But they didn't take it far enough. They didn't study the form so they could write really well. But it is possible, I believe, to write very good English haiku. I suppose I'll be struck dead for saying it, but I take a Japanese magazine of haiku in which they translate Japanese into English, and I would say that what is being written in English is better.
The Japanese are working with the ideas of how to build a haiku, but we've had to study it so much and we've had to figure it out. A lot of Japanese have heard the Japanese poems from their childhood and therefore think they can do it. And they can. They bring a spirit to haiku that I don't think English-speaking people will ever have - their sensitivity, their grace, their elegance. We can't do that. But we can bring what we are to that form.

winter confinement
again I'll lean on
this post

Stop telling stories

One of the early mistakes people make when writing haiku is that they want to tell a story because we come from a literary tradition of storytelling and it's hard to stop that. It's very easy to say "the door opened, the dog came and spilled his water on the cat".
That's not haiku. Haiku focuses in, it goes right to the very heart. In this story you would focus on the water hitting the cat and that's all you would talk about because that's all that's important in that story.
This is something that it takes a while for people to understand. One of the best ways of finding out what haiku are is to read them.

storm-torn banana tree
all night I listen to rain
in a basin

Basho Tree (banana-tree)

Reading and writing

But reading haiku is not easy. I handed a friend of mine a haiku book and she called me up weeks later and said, "Jane, you know I love you, but I cannot figure out what these are". And she simply didn't know how to read them - it's true that you have to learn how to read a haiku.
When they were first introduced in English people thought they were epigrams or aphorisms and that implies that they are one sentence long. Haiku are not sentences. A haiku is built of two parts: The phrase and the fragment. The fragment is usually in the third or first lines, and the phrase combines two lines, usually the second and third, or first and second.
I think Basho is the one who can show us most clearly that haiku is poetry. When he started writing they were like a game or a pastime, and unfortunately this aura still hangs around haiku and you see with this the online jokey haiku.
Basho took the idea that if you're a serious, deep person then your haiku will be serious and deep. Even though haiku are very small, they're extremely elastic (but remember that brevity doesn't leave room for mistakes). You can put in everything that you can feel, and it's only your lack of writing skills that would make that not possible.
Haiku can be, and sound extremely, simple but they hold vast reservoirs of meaning in their layers, like the Basho poem about the crow:

autumn evening
a crow settles down
on a bare branch

It's also interesting that haiku being so small have the most rules. Everybody who has learned it in the 2nd grade has learned 17 syllables and something about nature and you think you've got it covered, but you haven't - I'm still learning new rules, many from working with Basho's poems.I wish you many delights on your own journey to being a poet and may haiku be your starting point and companion.

Jane Reichhold

This article was published earlier at http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz and published here with her kind permission.

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I hope you did like this article and I hope it has given you new ideas and thoughts to work with ... I have read this article with joy and it inspired me to write the following haiku ... in which I think I have caught the essence of the article and the beauty of Basho's haiku:

with my bare feet

in the cool grass of dawn
Ah! what a feeling

Well ... see you ... I am always searching for nice articles about haiku ... so if you have an idea? Than please let me know it.

Namaste,

Chèvrefeuille, your host

Carpe Diem Special #120, Richard Wright's first "their watching faces "

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

First I have to explain the confusing for today's prompt. As you maybe know I write all my posts first on paper, before publishing them. I have done that also with the prompt-lists of every month. In our prompt list for December the prompt for December 4th had disappeared . So I put in another prompt for the 4th "isolation", but as I looked back on my hand-written promptlist for December I saw that I had planned a CD-Special on December 4th. I have corrected our promptlist and so I offer you today a Carpe Diem Special ... a haiku by our featured haiku-poet, Richard Wright (1908-1960). One of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of "Native Son," and "Black Boy", was also, it turns out, a major poet. During the last eighteen months of his life, he discovered and became enamored of haiku, the strict seventeen-syllable Japanese form. Wright became so excited about the discovery that he began writing his own haiku, in which he attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African American, the same Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship, not to his fellow man as he had in his fiction, but to nature and the natural world.  

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku, from which he chose, before he died, the 817 he preferred. Rather than a deviation from his self-appointed role as spokesman for black Americans of his time, Richard Wright's haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, are a culmination: not only do they give added scope to his work but they bring to it a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them. Wright wrote his haiku obsessively--in bed, in cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. The discovery and writing of haiku also helped him come to terms with nature and the earth, which in his early years he had viewed as hostile and equated with suffering and physical hunger. Fighting illness and frequently bedridden, deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother, Wright continued to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness.

Richard Wright has written a great bunch of haiku so I can choose from more than 4000 haiku ... not an easy task. Richard Wright was caught by the strict 5-7-5 syllables rule, so in these Carpe Diem Specials we have to do that too. As you all know the goal is to write/compose a haiku in the same sense, tone and spirit as the one given without the obligation to use the classical 5-7-5 rule, but ... because of Richard Wright's love for that strict form of 5-7-5 this month the CD-Specials have to follow the 5-7-5 rule, not my "cup of tea" by the way, but I will try to do that myself of course ... I have to be your role-model and follow the rules myself (smiles).

Here is our first haiku written by Richard Wright to inspire you and challenge you to use the 5-7-5 rule ...

Their watching faces,

as I walk the autumn road
make me a traveler.

© Richard Wright

Credits: Richard Wright, An Unknown Treasure of Black Poetry

Will not be easy to write/compose an all new haiku inspired on this beauty by Richard Wright, but I have to try it of course ... so here I go .... composing an all new haiku with the classical 5-7-5 rule ...

following the sand path
circling around this mountain
I feel like an eagle

© Chèvrefeuille

Pf ... this was a kind of heavy labour ... as you all know I am from The Netherlands and in my country the rules for syllables are easier than in English (which is not my maiden language), but I am quit confident that this one follows the rules of English and in that way .... I think this is one of my better haiku following the 5-7-5 rule, the classical one .... I hope you did like this CD-Special and I am looking forward to all of your wonderful responses on this haiku by Richard Wright.

I feel like an eagle

And to conclude this post I love to share a video of the once so famous pop-group ABBA, I was a big fan of their music and I kope you like this video and the music. (© BBC, published by f23r on You Tube)

This episode will be open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until December 6th at noon (CET). I will publish our new episode, peace, later on. For now ... have fun, be inspired and share your haiku with us all here at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai. 
!! I am busy with some changing on our haiku kai. Today I have tried another font type, but I love to hear what you think of it !!
!! I have revised our "moon Anthology e-book" I have included a moon-haiku by Cathy Tenzo of Haiku Plate Special !!

Carpe Diem Ghost Writer #36, Haiku Noir (by Jen of Blog It or Lose It)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

This week's GW-post is another one written by Jen of Blog It or Lose It. She is very active and it's really a joy to have her as a kind of "co-writer". This week she was inspired by the "film noir" genre.
So I hope you all will like this new GW-post.
!! By the way. As I read our prompt-list again I saw that I now have two time a December 4th, so I have to change that again. Yesterday I brought in "isolation" for December 4th, but it turned out that I had planned a CD-Special by Richard Wright, our featured haiku-poet this month. So I will delete "isolation" and will bring you a CD Special at December 4th. Sorry for the inconvenience !!

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Haiku noir: Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep

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Greetings, fellow Haijin! 

After many years I finally read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.  If that title sounds familiar to you, it’s because there is a famous movie by the same name – featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.  It is a “film noir” gem.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “film noir” you’ll know film noir when you see it.  Think of a 1940s black-and-white detective movie.  Here are some common film noir scenes:

·         Driving at night … in the rain;

·         Dark, shadowy, smoky rooms with venetian blind shadows;

·         People in trench coats standing alone in the fog … or on a pier … or in an alley … or a street corner … or in some sort of awkward, lonely, vulnerable position.

Reading The Big Sleep was a delight.  Yes, Raymond Chandler had a wonderfully dry wit (“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead”).  But – he was also a master in setting a scene in very few words.  And the way he describes nature – especially ominous parts of nature – is magnificent.  Here are two quotes from the novel: 

“The tumbling rain was solid white spray in the headlights. The windshield wiper could hardly keep the glass clear enough to see through. But not even the drenched darkness could hide the flawless lines of the orange trees wheeling away like endless spokes into the night.”

Or …

“I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly.”

Sure, he’s talking about nature – but it is nature hemmed-in by rainy highways, poking out of the darkness, and reeking of exhaust – and there’s a perpetual sense of unease. 

Credits: Double Indeminity

 So for this post, I would like you to write “haiku noir” – haiku that explores the darker parts of nature – nature at the dirty edges of humanity:

·         Night time without a full moon – night with a sense of darkness and vulnerability;

·         Sense of foreboding, unease, danger;

·         Things that are “sensed” in the night more than seen;

·         Unidentified sounds and/or a sense of not being alone;

·         Cityscapes

For those of you in the deepest, darkest parts of the world – sorry I’m not bringing sunshine with this prompt!  BUT – perhaps you’ll have plenty to share with us.  I hope you’ll join in anyway.

Also note – this isn’t an exercise in creating a Humphrey Bogart haiku – we’re recreating the feel of film noir without heavy pop culture references.

A tall order – hopefully I can deliver!

A haiku:

a dim street lamp
in a pale orange fog –
almost bleeding

Tires and Feet in the Slush (photo © Jen)

 And a tanka:

the city is curled
around a tossed cigarette
hissing in slush
and even the lamp light
recoils from its strike

So – what do you see in the city at night?  Or – what makes you uneasy? 

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Further Investigation:

Raymond Chandler –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler

The Big Sleep (Film) –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sleep_(1946_film)

Film Noir –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir

Text of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” –
http://ae-lib.org.ua/texts-c/chandler__the_big_sleep__en.htm

Film Noir and Jazz – Mood Music for Writing –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyEV0OHlgaE

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Thanks to The Muscleheaded Blog for helping me round up the photos and for offering advice.
http://muscleheaded.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/his-name-is-philip-marlowe/

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I hope you all did like this GW-post on "haiku-noir" ... it's really a joy to be a Ghost Writer for our Carpe Diem Haiku Kai. So if you have an idea, article or something to use as a GW-post ... please let me know. You can email your GW-post to:

carpediemhaikukai@outlook.com or carpediemhaikukai@gmail.com

Have fun with this GW-post and share your haiku or tanka with us all. This GW-post is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until December 5th at noon (CET). Enjoy it. I will publish our next post, our first CD-Special by Richard Wright.

Carpe Diem "Time Glass" #12 "autumn sunlight"

!! Sorry guys and girls ... I am a little bit to late with publishing this Time Glass episode, because I was studying ... have to do a mathematics exam tomorrow ... so you have one hour lesser !!

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

It's Monday again and that means ... time for a new episode of our time-challenging feature "Time Glass" in which you have 18 hours to respond on the given image and prompt. This week I have a nice (and wonderful) image and prompt for you all.

Cob web in early sunlight (© Chèvrefeuille, your host)

This photo I made in my neighborhood on a great "Indian Summer day" this year and I think it will inspire you to write an all new haiku within 18 hours. With this photo I have this prompt:

autumn sunlight

So ... I am looking forward to all of your wonderful haiku. Remember ... you have only 18 hours to respond starting tonight at 7.00 PM (CET). This 'Time Glass" episode will remain open until tomorrow, December 2nd at 1.00 PM (CET). Have fun!

Carpe #617, delight in company

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I am very moved by all of your responses on our last post about my brother and all the kind and loving words you have sprinkled on me ... thank you ... this makes our haiku-family ... feeling one trough haiku and the joy haiku brings us all.
MMT brought a little mistake under my attention and that I have corrected. I had overseen December 4th in our promptlist, so I have brought in another nice modern kigo based on Jane's "A Dictionary of Haiku".

Today our prompt is delight in company and I think this prompt fits our Carpe Diem Haiku Kai so well. However aren't physical in each other's company, but through haiku we are delighted with our company, our haiku-family. It feels really great to see how CDHK has evolved to a family of loving and caring haiku poets and that's all thanks to you all my dear Haijin, visitors and travelers.
I love to ask you to look at this prompt as if it was an episode of our CD special feature, "Romancing the Haiku", because I think this prompt is so right for romance ...

As I look at the examples of Jane than she has a great feeling for this prompt. She gave a few wonderful examples and I love to share a few with you all:

your poem
the brief language
of footsteps

bird song
under winter quilts
bodies touching

together
your tip glows
as incense burns

seaweed tied in knots
ashore in winter storm
we stick together

© Jane Reichhold

These are gorgeous and that second is my favorite. It is a great haiku in which I sense really the delight which company can give ... it brought a wonderful haiku into my mind, which I wrote several years ago. In this haiku I think 'delight in company' is so strong present ...

lost in the field
only stars as my compass -
cry of a snowy owl

© Chèvrefeuille

Credits: Snowy Owl

And I couldn't pass along with sharing a haiku in the romantic sense of the prompt:

making love
in front of the fireplace
finally home

© Chèvrefeuille

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until December 4th at noon (CET). I will publish our first GW-post of this month later on. For now ... have fun!

!! PS Today I will publish a new episode of our time challenging Time Glass feature, in which you have 18 hours to respond !!