Writing as Grazing: Lessons from Haiku
Haiku by Michael J. Rosen
under one willow
horse huddles—half shaded,
half casting shadows
Our local library—across from my son’s elementary school—knows their audience. There are two shelves dedicated to Minecraft books, and I’m often asked to swing by on the way home so we can see if there’s anything new.
During a recent visit, I grabbed The Horse’s Haiku from the shelf and added it to our pile. It’s a beautiful children’s book filled with exactly what it sounds like. I included one of my favorites above, but I especially loved what the author, Michael J. Rosen, wrote at the end of the book.
“Horses are grazers: they continually eat in the same area before moving on to the next. (Creatures who are browsers, by contrast, move around, eating a little of this, a little of that.) So, too, the art of haiku is standing right here, seizing a fleeting observation, and then mulling words over and over until a poem emerges.
Horses are prey animals. With eyes on the sides of their face, the collective alertness of their herd’s sense, and the ability to sleep standing up in case danger requires them to flee, horses are finely tuned to the noises, scents, and motions in their environment.
Similarly, I’ve come to see haiku as an act of vigilance.
Vigilant grazing: Haiku is the practice of seeing still. (Yes, think “sitting still,” but applied to the mind and senses.) So while such sustained attention might pertain to many forms of writing, what’s unique to haiku is that there’s no browsing onto something else. Each poem stays here and now. The challenge is finding words to suspend one instant of awareness within a poem’s sparse lines.
Basho, the Japanese writer who inspired much of what we know about this poetic form, said that a haiku lives on the tip of the tongue … So a haiku requires you, a reader, to recognize what’s being suggested. Seen in that light, haiku is an interaction between a writer and a reader. Through a shared language, both experience a particular moment. A similar interaction exists between a rider and a horse: they share a language—their immediate circumstances, their history of practice, their knowledge of each other—that permits a profound partnership.”
I’ve been thinking about the topic of freedom recently. How the feeling of driving away, flying away, is something that fills me with so much lightness. Yet this isn’t my daily reality.
So I’m asking myself: How can I bring more freedom into my routine so I’m not constantly longing for what’s out there, but present to what’s right here?
I don’t have a fully formed answer yet, but I know that writing is always one way in.
Sometimes one haiku a day is all you need.
