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John's Choices
Fifteen OutlawPoets
unleashed seventy insects for the November haiku thread. Some insects
appeared in a pleasant setting, but other insects behaved in their
natural manner testing—straining—the wits of humans.
First Choice:
# 02.
not a sound—
the tiger butterfly
moves among the lilies
Yvette d'Anjo, US
Yvette d’Anjou’s tiger
butterfly haiku appeals to the senses of sight and sound in a pleasant
setting. The colorful black and yellow tiger butterfly moving among
lilies of many colors in a warm, sunlit summer garden is a vivid sight.
As the butterfly moves from lily to lily the absence of intruding sound
enhances the panoply of summer colors. Now, at the beginning of
December, reading this haiku provides a pleasant remembrance of a
delightful summer experience.
Let’s face it! Insects generally are a plague to humans. Many of the
poems in the thread remind me of unpleasant experiences with those
pesky, little critters. Choosing the second place haiku was difficult
for me. Finally, I succumbed to the charms of the following two haiku:
Second Choice:
# 51.
In my hair,
dreaming of a calm shelter—
the tiny louse
Rita Odeh, IS
# 04.
With a smile, I spare
the lingering mosquitoes
early November...
Cristian Mocanu, RO
In both of these haiku the
collision between the insect world and the human environment is
inevitable. Who has not had to deal with pesky hair lice, and who has
not dealt a fatal blow to a pesky mosquito.
Both of these poems contain an element of black, sardonic humor. While
the personified dream of the louse is a “calm shelter,” the implied
reality for the human is riddance of a pest. The dream of the infesting
“wee beste” will be short-lived. Rita Odeh uses this implied irony to
make a humorous statement about the certain demise of this unwanted
creature.
Cristian Mocanu employs the same kind of black humor when he decides to
“spare” the lives of “lingering mosquitoes” knowing that their life
cycle will end naturally when they suddenly succumb to the coldness of
November weather. These two sweet ironies leave me smiling and laughing
with an audible sigh.
John Daleiden, editor
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