That afternoon I went for a walk with a crowd.
Ninety-three people, to be exact, including me.
We sat in silence to contemplate the landscape.
A little acrobatic bird, the first golden leaves of autumn playing with the breeze, the light throwing handfuls of diamonds into the river, ducklings playing in the current before the fixed gaze of mother duck, a yellow rose stranded in the algae.
Sudden discoveries.
I closed the book, the haikus anthology 2024, in which, surprisingly, my name appears. The remaining ninety-two are my fellow poets who gave me multiple and sudden sighs of astonishment that afternoon.
Each of their poems, in their seventeen syllables, awakened a reverie that otherwise would go unnoticed.
Recently, a young friend of my son who was interested in poetry, asked me: What is a haiku? and I gave him the official definition: an ancient poetic composition of Japanese origin that consists of three verses of five, seven and five syllables respectively. They generally talk about nature or everyday life.
But they are much more than that.
In their brevity, haikus express an intimate view, a suggestive everyday life, a beautiful melancholy.
The old pond
a frog leaps in
sound of the water
It is an example of haiku by one of the most famous poets of this genre, Matsuo Basho.
I hope with this brief chronicle I have answered the curious young boy’s question in more detail and from now on he can appreciate the fleeting moments with intensity and not like that couple.
– Look my love, a shooting star, make a wish – says the gallant.
– My wish is that you stop drinking alcohol – she says.
– Oh, I was wrong, it was a plane.
Leonor Henríquez (Caracas, Venezuela) Civil Engineer by training (UCAB 1985), writer and apprentice poet by vocation. From her time in engineering emerged her Office Stories (1997), another way of seeing the corporate world. Her latest publications include reflections on grief, Hopecrumbs (2020) (www.hopecrumbs.com) and “The Adventures of Chispita” (2021) (www.chispita.ca) an allegory of life inside Mom’s belly.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com