Haiku for Van Gogh
by Yuri Kageyama
An old wooden desk
Yellow dots of light shrieking
Van Gogh’s room
Warped plums dagger rain
Crazed geisha dance in ukiyoe oil
Breathe Van Gogh’s Japan
Sliced ear of love denied
Road to nothing ravens in flight
Genius of yellow
Abortion
_ a poem by Yuri Kageyama
circling earth spinning mind
I dread the scalpel and the guilt
the blood does not come
words careless words carefree
letters like scalpels that bleed
I am made of words
so without love
the fetus wrenched from within
so I turn to words
a story stillborn
abortion resurrected
yet I am made of words
taste the characters
sumi stroke patterns cover
my pale naked skin
come home my baby
womb wounds of words gaping wide
uterus darkness
^ — < This is a poem that developed out of an exchange with a writer on Twitter. The lines are all from my part of the exchange, but we set up a rule so that each had to follow an idea from the other, especially the last line, as an inspiration springboard for the next three lines of haiku. We wrote three lines each day. And we took turns. I never told this other person I was writing about abortion. I have subsequently changed the “we” in some lines to “I.” I guess I wanted the statements to be softer in the Twitter exchange by making them come from “we.” But I really meant “I.” I am grateful to the tweeter who helped me write this poem, a segment at a time, a day at a time, and to Twitter for giving us as a tool for personal poetic expression. It has a different feel from a poem written in a single sitting.
Haiku by Yuri Kageyama
a blue plastic bag
so hard so still no more
Tokyo train tracks
in my deathly dreams
your sweet breath, fat knees, wet hands
a child forever
timeless tweet timeline
scroll blindly touch-panel light
mumbles of loneliness
I wrote these recently, the last one just a few seconds ago.
The first one is about the body bags that we see lying by the railroad tracks because a fair number of Japanese people commit suicide by flinging themselves in front of commuter trains.
It is stunning how the bags have an eerily impersonal color, and they are motionless and rigid.
But you can tell for some reason that it is a body in there, nothing else.
There is nothing that we can do as witnesses except to pray.
The body bags are a constant reminder of the otherworldly closeness of death amid the mundane like riding the commuter train to work.
They seem to increase during the winter months _ maybe because cold is more depressing than warm, especially if you are feeling down, and maybe because the year-end and New Year’s holiday season comes as a stark reminder of how extremely alone a lonely person really is.
My third poem is about Twitter, which I do quite actively because it is encouraged on my job.
I see how people want to connect to others, not just the people they know in real life, but to others they will never meet.
It’s called networking, and it shows how the world is a small place in this rapidly globalizing age.
As the world turns, the iPhone touch-panel whirls under your fingertips as you scroll the Twitter timeline, showing comments from all over the world, mostly about nothing, and photos of dinners and lunches and sunsets and pets.
It is a cool technology and a convenient tool.
But it is also about how people are alone but can’t stand to be by themselves.
People are lonely.
The poem in-between is about my recurring dreams, where my son, who is fully grown in his 20s, is still a toddler.
My little boy.
I wake up, looking for him, almost panicked, wondering if he is OK, and then I am relieved there is no need to worry.
It is just a dream.
I have always believed death would be like a dream, except you never wake up.
And so I realize these dreams are a reminder that I am still always reliving motherhood, though I am just growing older and getting closer to death.
I’m reliving that moment of motherhood, with my son being that eternal child, and death will not be an end at all but a recurring dream.
I feel as though I am going backward in time.
Life has no beginning or end.
Death is just a string of pockets of different dreamlike moments, in no particular order, in and out, falling and flying and rising, being lost in a blurry faraway dream.
Previous Haiku by Yuri Kageyama.
From Yuri to Yuri _ Japanese Womanhood Across Borders of Time
A Contemporary Renku Poem (a work in progress)
(13)
HAIKU
ステンドグラス
ひかりを染める
妻のゆび
stained glass
nudging color into light
my wife’s fingers
春の朝
ピンクが爆発
シフォン舞う
spring morning
pink explodes
chiffon whirls
なき孫が
小皺に霞む
化粧水
dead grandchild
a blurring thought lost in wrinkles
skin lotion’s smell
田んぼにも
見える砂漠の
地平線
rice paddies
you can see it
a desert horizon
浜名湖に
沈め忘れる
父の虐待
at Hamanako
forgetting burying
beatings by my father
桜ちり
ここにいます！と
どぶによむ
sakura petals
falling, write “I am here!”
into the ditch
So I’ve put all the haiku together that I wrote recently. In two parts, they are my segments for the work-in-progress poem “From Yuri To Yuri,” a collaboration with Yuri Matsueda.
The first part of the series.
I’ve decided to change the haiku from before to this:
八重桜
ここにいます！と
どぶに散る
Yaezakura
I am here! Scattering
petals in the ditch
The way I had it before with 影のなか (In the shadows) was too regular/predictable haiku-like.
Today, on my way to work, I saw cherry trees bending over a muddy ditch.
I realized that image sent a stronger message about what I was feeling _ that the flowers bloom wherever they are, even if no one is watching or aware of its existence.
That to me is utter beauty and presence and life.
And a ditch still can be a good dark backdrop for cascading pink petals.
田んぼにも
見える砂漠の
地平線
rice paddies
you can see it
a desert horizon
浜名湖に
沈め忘れる
父の虐待
At Hamanako
forgetting burying
beatings by my father
影のなか
ここにいます！と
八重桜
In the shadows
I am here! says
Yaezakura
Recently, I was riding the bullet train and I noticed once again how so much of Japan was farmland encased by tree-covered mountains, village after village of rice paddies, places where you would expect the Fox to come out and enchant travelers like Japanese fairy tales.
This made me think about how you can’t really see very far into the distance in Japan as you can in the US, where the horizon stretches a la “Easy Rider.”
And I thought about how that creates a village mentality in Japan, both in the good sense and the bad, how Japanese must learn to cope with everyone-knowing-everyone’s business like the rush-hour train and how that builds team work and common identity while discouraging meaningless ego trips, though sometimes at a cost to individualism.
So I was working on haiku about how you can’t see the horizon in Japan.
But then I realized you should be able to see the invisible _ if you are a poet.
The poem refers to the contrast of East vs. West, and uses that to make a statement on how seeing beyond what is there is the redeeming value of art.
My second haiku came when I passed by Hamanako, a lake that connects with the Pacific Ocean in Shizuoka Prefecture.
My father grew up around this lake, and he knew its ins and outs for going fishing on rented boats, catching crab with nets, digging for clams.
My sister and I often spent our childhood around this lake.
The lake works as a symbol of my father who was very Japanese yet also very international _ like an inland lake or bay where you could sense in the sometimes quiet and other times powerful tide its deep connection with the expansive Pacific.
The poem is about how you want to forget parental abuse because all a child wants is love, and you realize as you get older that the abuse was not about hate but more about the mental problems the parent was undergoing as an adult.
But it is never possible to forget _ or totally forgive.
So I wrote that line to purposely fudge between forgetting to bury or forgetting and burying (especially in Japanese) because it’s both.
My last poem is simple.
I noticed how flowers don’t care if anyone is looking or not.
They bloom wherever they are, merely being true to their purpose of being.
And they are always beautiful, whether anyone is looking or not.
I’m not sure if I fully communicate that nuance in that poem. It’s rather plain like a first-grader wrote it.
But that’s what I like about that one.
So I have more:
春の朝
ピンクが爆発
シフォン舞う
spring morning
pink explodes
chiffon whirls
^___<
なき孫が
小皺に霞む
化粧水
dead grandchild
a blurring thought lost in wrinkles
skin lotion’s smell
Recently, I ran into a cab driver who was a haiku poet.
He read me his haiku about Girls’ Day dolls sitting in the darkness where the fragrance of peach blossoms was wafting.
He also said his best poems are the ones he thought were duds while those he thought came out well were never very good.
During our conversation, he also talked about how he gave gifts to his most loyal customers, who called him to pick them up all the time, including stained glass works his wife made.
His wife taught stained glass, and she could fix works her students left behind, saving on costs for those gifts.
I asked him to compose haiku then-and-there with the words, “stained glass.”
He told me that even though “stained glass” in Japanese (su-te-n-do-gu-ra-su) is a phrase composed of seven syllables, you can make haiku that’s seven-seven-five, not just five-seven-five, so that “stained glass” could be the first, or the second, line.
You learn something everyday, especially from cab drivers.
But he said groaning he couldn’t think of haiku on stained glass offhand.
He felt shy, he confessed, about writing haiku whose subject matter involved his wife.
I told him to please come up with one until we meet again.
I have yet to run into him, but meanwhile I have written haiku inspired by stained glass!
stained glass
nudging color into light
my wife’s fingers
stained glass
hikari wo someru
tsuma no yubi
An old wooden desk
Yellow dots of light, shrieking
Filling Van Gogh’s room
Artwork by Van Gogh is among the pieces from Orsay on display now at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. I am struck by how the painting is filled with happiness. We are so used to the image of Van Gogh as a tormented lonely ear-shaving painter. Another painting that stood out is Auguste Renoir’s portrait of Claude Monet. There is so much respect and love in that painting. Besides the works, and the artists’ lives behind the works, we also see the relationships among the artists.