Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is a response to Leslie Giddens’ letter in Blithe Spirit 11/4.  I have often found haiku making to be a therapeutic exercise. I do not know why this is so. Perhaps its healing power is, in no small measure, the result of having to focus the mind on an image/idea while attempting to manipulate it into a well-formed haiku.

     Recently I found myself in a gloomy wide-awake mood in the early hours. Resignedly, I got up made a mug of tea, collected a pen and note pad and went back to bed. A series of haiku ideas appeared with little effort on my part and, after a fair amount of tweaking, I ended up with the following sequence as it presented itself to me.

In the early hours
the wind rattles windows
a sinking feeling.

Tossing and turning
useless things hang in my mind -
when will the dawn come?

If useless things do not hang in your mind/Then every season is a good season.        

Chinese poem.

High above the cloud
insignificance below
loses its meaning.

The patterns of twigs
significance of the trees
against the pale sky.

Disturbing dreams float
cloud the mind all through the night
a fresh breeze needed.

After a mild day
dead flies on the windowsill
middle of winter.

Forlornly I watch
the tortoiseshell butterfly
will it live till spring?

Ghostly dreams persist
black nights - grey days will follow
till the sun burns through.

This bird is soaring
in the cloudless summer sky
the earth forgotten.

     In retrospect, this sequence seems to have become a therapeutic diary but I am convinced it was the process of haiku-making that lifted my mood - eventually. I did manage to get more sleep afterwards but, unfortunately, I slept through the alarm.

     I find that reading haiku has a healing effect especially if the haiku chimes with one's mood and/or experiences. To me, the greatest healing power is found in the rare haiku with a spiritual ambience, for example, this haiku by Bashō:-

Summer grasses !
The imprint of dreams
Of warriors.

‘[The] expression of unity in all things, manifested in the world of karma, is presented over and over in Bashō’s haiku...’
(Robert Aitken: A Zen Wave: Bashō’s Haiku and Zen p.151, ISBN 0-8348-0137-X)