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As a kind of honorary BHS member, having carried and fetched, wrapped and filed for the ex-Membership Secretary, being invited to choose a haiku for this Award was both a privilege and a daunting prospect. However, I decided to follow the example of a previous adjudicator: I began by reading all the haiku in the 10/4 edition of Blithe Spirit, hoping that the haiku would find me. It did: Kim Paul Richardson’s

The fiddler’s wife
watching his fingers move
knits him a scarf

To me, this haiku captures beautifully the kind of moment when, as in life, two separate but juxtaposed incidents are merged into one. The fiddler, dextrously using his fingers, is focussing on his music (one supposes) while at the same time his wife, who is knitting him a scarf, is dextrously moving hers. As a knitter myself, I know that knitting is an activity than can be done at the same time as something else: listening and looking. The fact that she is knitting him a scarf suggests another link: like music, a scarf both encompasses and warms.

Some may argue that the haiku contains a hidden simile, that one action is being compared to another, but I would argue differently. All life is carried on simultaneously. Only occasionally can we witness two things happening at the same time. There is a certain challenging allusiveness in the haiku that arouses association in the reader’s mind, demanding to be unravelled, like knitting.

Not only this, but I think the haiku follows what I understand to be the Japanese thinking of a haiku poet by breaking down into three phrases:

the fiddler
his wife knitting
her watching him (and perhaps a glance between them)

There is a certain spontaneity in the haiku: the writer, not looking for a haiku, totally absorbed in the fiddler’s music and movements, has suddenly become aware of the two separate but conjoined images. The haiku finds the writer.