The cicada are still out and are wonderful. I’ve done a number of posts about them recently. The other day I was listening to them again and they inspired me to write a haiku.
眼つむれば若さを感じる蝉の声
me tsumureba wakasa kanjiru semi no koe
when I close my eyes
I feel young—
the cicada sing
I wrote the Japanese first, so the English is a translation. After you have been learning a language for awhile, for some situations the words of that language just pop up before words of your native language. It’s a strange experience when you think about it, but also normal enough.
I was sitting and listening to the cicada. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get completely overwhelmed by everything around me. Too much to read, way too much email, too much clutter on my desk and in my house, too much unwanted bad news echoing around in my head that people have told me about, too much everything. Meditation is a big help for these moods, but sometimes instead of going to my bedroom to sit on my zafu I’ll instead just kind of zone out, open the window, and listen to nature. That’s what I was doing here. I must have sat and listened to them for a few minutes, eyes closed, and then this popped into my head.
As many of you know, I prefer free-form haiku when I am writing in English. English is not Japanese and I think the 5/7/5 format doesn’t really work all that well with English syllables. It can be forced to work, but the flow of English is just different and I go with the flow. But with Japanese, I try to stick to the strict count. Japanese flows much much better, naturally falling into groups of 5 and 7 for starters, but also the structure helps me put the haiku together.
Although the cicada will continue into autumn, they are a summer kigo (season word) as that is their main time. It is autumn now according to the traditional Japanese calendar that the haiku world uses, so I suppose technically I should be using autumn kigo now and not summer ones. Oh well. I was never very good at following rules.