Editor’s Choice

WHR Spring 2023

Photo credit – Susumu Takiguchi

snowflakes fall
into the darkness
of a bombed house

Daniela Misso, Italy

This haiku has won the R. H. Blyth Award 2023. It is a shining example of the fact that excellent haiku can be composed without using difficult words or concepts. It is also a useful proof that good haiku can be attained in spite of, or even because of, breaking some rules. In this instance, the rule it violates is that haiku must not be a ‘sentence’, once a great taboo in the American-led haiku trend. The author may not even be aware of this rule. That’s just as well. What is involved here underlies the importance of a basic point: haiku should always come first (and rules and other conventions second).

Each of the rules has its own reason of being and background, which needs to be learnt and respected. However, one must not be a slave to it and these rules should not be the “be-all and end-all” of haiku.

The use of plain language mentioned above is in fact much profounder and more fundamental than some may think. When the original form of haiku was first introduced in the 17th century Japan one of its most important tenets was ‘ordinary things in ordinary words’ of the people as opposed to ‘high things in high words’ of the aristocratic and upper classes.

This can be said to be a ‘revolution’ in the history of Japanese poetry, advanced and refined by Basho and other innovative poets then and after. Before then, intellectualism, cleverness, refined sentiments expressed in highly polished and stylized forms and vocabulary were the ideal way of poetry composition with waka playing a leading role.

What is interesting about this haiku is that everything in it is concrete and clear, snowflakes, the act of falling, darkness, bomb and house, and yet they can also be interpreted as symbolic. In other words, it may be only a ‘sketch’ of what is actually happening but snowflakes and darkness may symbolize something else.

For example, snowflakes can represent whiteness such as a dove which is again a symbol of peace. So, ‘something relating to peace is falling (descending) into a blackhole of hell’ can be an imagined association. What is important is that haiku can obtain depth and richness in addition to what its words say.

Besides, the haiku has impressive pictorial quality: white against black, rather like some of the Japanese suiboku-ga (ink and brush). Musically, it has overwhelming sense of silence, which is totally in contrast with the chaos and noises of the action in the war.

Philosophically, it has a quality of the sensibility of medieval Japan, where it was perceived that nothing stayed the same and that everything changed, that even the greatest prosperity of a despot would eventually decline and fall, that whatever began inevitably had an end and that all lives would decay or be destroyed.

The sight of bombed-out buildings in Ukraine makes us feel vulnerable and helpless as well as sad and angry. Modern houses and buildings are in a sense an evidence of what humans have long strived for since the cave men’s time to create a safe, decent, civilised and meaningful life, protecting ourselves from the harms of nature, human savagery, aggression and violence and all forms of destruction. Of course we will rebuild, reconstruct and restart. It is an endless repetition of construction and destruction. That is one unmistakable aspect of human history. But in the end we will all be gone, connected to the end of our planet. All that will be left will be our written and unwritten history which will be sadly irrelevant to our finished selves.

Without saying who bombed whom, or where it happened, or who it was that was witnessing this scene or which side he/she was on, Daniela’s haiku has the power to make us immediately know what she is talking about.

Because these things are unsaid, the haiku has become universal and timeless. The conflict could be anywhere, started and responded by anyone, but always produced the same results: death and destruction. The war in Ukraine is an agonizing reminder that the evil which is inherent in us humans just as the good in us too has not changed at all since the time immemorial. Without us being able at last to turn Mr. Hyde in us back into Dr. Jekyll we will be conditioned, or cursed, to permanent coils of making war forever.