Harvest moon haiku
26th September 2010
A little late but here's one for the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Jugoya - Fifteenth Night - as it's known in Japan.
Boy cradles a lantern
under a sky with no moon
he must have borrowed it.
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The unanswerables
22nd September 2010
On Monday, the BBC website carried a story about the top 10 hardest questions to answer, according to search engine Ask Jeeves.
Are they really that hard? Let's see:
1. What is the meaning of life?
A: 42.
2. Is there a God?
A: Is there a you?
3. Do blondes have more fun?
A: Define fun.
4. What is the best diet?
A: Define best.
5. Is there anybody out there?
A: Boo!
6. Who is the most famous person in the world?
A: Not me.
7. What is love?
A: Something better than the best diet in the world.
8. What is the secret to happiness?
A: A bad memory.
9. Did Tony Soprano die?
A: Well, go ask him.
10. How long will I live?
A: You know the answer to that better than I do.
There. Piece of mochi.
22nd September 2010
On Monday, the BBC website carried a story about the top 10 hardest questions to answer, according to search engine Ask Jeeves.
Are they really that hard? Let's see:
1. What is the meaning of life?
A: 42.
2. Is there a God?
A: Is there a you?
3. Do blondes have more fun?
A: Define fun.
4. What is the best diet?
A: Define best.
5. Is there anybody out there?
A: Boo!
6. Who is the most famous person in the world?
A: Not me.
7. What is love?
A: Something better than the best diet in the world.
8. What is the secret to happiness?
A: A bad memory.
9. Did Tony Soprano die?
A: Well, go ask him.
10. How long will I live?
A: You know the answer to that better than I do.
There. Piece of mochi.
Thursday, September 09, 2010
What's it like where you are?
9th September 2010
A charming haiku yesterday on the Mainichi Daily News website:
Today's weather report -
Sunny over the pool with gusts of
Small screaming children.
One from Singaporean Michelle Ang. We went to the same school but didn't meet until we moved to the same city.
9th September 2010
A charming haiku yesterday on the Mainichi Daily News website:
Today's weather report -
Sunny over the pool with gusts of
Small screaming children.
One from Singaporean Michelle Ang. We went to the same school but didn't meet until we moved to the same city.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
How do you know?
25th January 2010
A friend is wondering if she should quit a steady job to do something different and a little crazy.
Someone who knows us both asked how I knew I was ready to leave when I did the same thing about three years ago.
But the thing is, you'll never be ready. If you're trying to tell stories, you'll end up breaking more things than you build because humanity is huge and anything you make to hold it will crack. Our hands never seem big enough or wise enough. And there never seems to be enough savings in the bank.
So it's not a question of readiness at all. It's a question of whether you want to.
Do you?
25th January 2010
A friend is wondering if she should quit a steady job to do something different and a little crazy.
Someone who knows us both asked how I knew I was ready to leave when I did the same thing about three years ago.
But the thing is, you'll never be ready. If you're trying to tell stories, you'll end up breaking more things than you build because humanity is huge and anything you make to hold it will crack. Our hands never seem big enough or wise enough. And there never seems to be enough savings in the bank.
So it's not a question of readiness at all. It's a question of whether you want to.
Do you?
Monday, September 21, 2009
Paths we have not known
21st September 2009
Sometimes, it is the road more travelled that haunts us.
'Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension...
'Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating...
'Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.'
- Tim Kreider, The New York Times' Happy Days blog
Then there is novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, writing in Tigana: 'There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.'
A comforting belief but one which - and I know this from long years of trying - takes work.
21st September 2009
Sometimes, it is the road more travelled that haunts us.
'Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension...
'Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating...
'Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.'
- Tim Kreider, The New York Times' Happy Days blog
Then there is novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, writing in Tigana: 'There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.'
A comforting belief but one which - and I know this from long years of trying - takes work.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The two of us on your bike
28th February 2009
One of the brands of tea that I buy ran a haiku contest and includes the winning entries in each box.
So in a box of 20 teabags, 20 poems. This morning - afternoon, really - I tore open a foil packet, took out the teabag and read on the other side of the packet:
二人乗り
重いと言わない
君の汗
Freely translated:
The two of us on your bike
but of the weight behind
your sweat, you say
nothing.
A winner from a junior high school girl.
28th February 2009
One of the brands of tea that I buy ran a haiku contest and includes the winning entries in each box.
So in a box of 20 teabags, 20 poems. This morning - afternoon, really - I tore open a foil packet, took out the teabag and read on the other side of the packet:
二人乗り
重いと言わない
君の汗
Freely translated:
The two of us on your bike
but of the weight behind
your sweat, you say
nothing.
A winner from a junior high school girl.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
When I was fifteen and worse
19th January 2009
When I was fifteen and worse, I wrote like I was icing a chandelier, dripping crystals from the bird's nest metal to shoot light every which way.
I am older now - and less caught up with dazzle.
A candle will do for a beacon and I stumble after, fumbling wicks and tallow to draw out a single stem of flicker bloom and leaf shadow.
But these hands remember chandeliers and, sometimes, they stray.
Nothing then but to bring them back to short words, shorter sentences. And from brevity, begin again.
19th January 2009
When I was fifteen and worse, I wrote like I was icing a chandelier, dripping crystals from the bird's nest metal to shoot light every which way.
I am older now - and less caught up with dazzle.
A candle will do for a beacon and I stumble after, fumbling wicks and tallow to draw out a single stem of flicker bloom and leaf shadow.
But these hands remember chandeliers and, sometimes, they stray.
Nothing then but to bring them back to short words, shorter sentences. And from brevity, begin again.
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