Parents know the trap: doing the very thing we tell our kids not to do. Shūson captured it perfectly in this haiku:
then realized
my three kids were watching
—Shūson
Shūson was one of the more famous modern haiku poets. Initially he hated the restrictive format of haiku and preferred the 31-mora tanka.[3] Then he met Shūōshi Mizuhara, a highly acclaimed haiku poet, and fell in love with the small verse. He had a serious illness in the 1960s and once recovered from it, his haiku took on ideas of human life and life in general.
His mentor, Mizuhara, was one of the free style[4] haiku poets of whom I’ve talked before. We can see that influence in this haiku, which by my count is 5/8/6 instead of the standard 5/7/5 count.
One of Shūson’s best-known verses, it captures that parental moment of being caught breaking your own rules.
I can especially relate. I always teach my boys to not kill and be kind to insects and animals. If we find spiders or even cockroaches in the house, I always get my boys to help me trap them, then we let them go outside. Yet a summer or two ago I was being bothered by mosquitoes at my in-law’s house and I impulsively smashed one that was biting my leg. Suddenly I heard a small voice cry: “Papa, why did you kill that bug?! That was a bad thing to do!”
I had no responce.
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We usually say 17 and 31 syllables for haiku and tanka out of convinience and simplicity, but the Japanese poems actually use mora, not syllables. Briefly, mora are almost the same but are often shorter. Perhaps I will write about this sometime, but check out Wikipedia for now. ↩
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Or gendai — “modern style” — haiku poet. ↩