Not a shot is fired,
PM Shinawatra's gone.
But the more things change...
One night in Bangkok
Makes a hard man humble. Now,
Pass me some pad thai.
The Hockey Haiku my brother sent were excerpts from a book by his colleague, described as the "long awaited marriage of Zen poetry and bloodsport." My favourites:
What's so Wild about
Minnesota? Ten thousand
lakes fill up with tears.
Berserk hockey dads
have different agendas
Coach has a shiner
These haiku reminded me of the haiku I composed when we read The Odyssey for Pharos Book Club:
Polyphemus' eye:
A niche for my hot poker.
Fruitless blind fury
My foolish shipmates
Release Aeolian gales
While I dream of home.
Fair Penelope
Beacon of fidelity
For twenty years. Wow.
This started some one-upmanship between my brother and brothers-in-law. B wrote:
In my hopes and dreams
I'll never be so clever
As my dear friend Islam
-damn...
I replied:
Too true, Fat Bastard.
Push yourself from the table
Before you explode.
My brother F immediately punished me for that crack:
Insults come quickly
To a cringing scrawn tapping
Computer keys
M, my other brother-in-law, could not be outdone by us youngsters. He shared a series of Bardic haiku, though sonnets would perhaps have been more apt:
To be or not, now?
An existential question.
But we all die still.
Tomorrow is a
Curse to an ambitious king
Whose candle gutters.
Filial love is
A salve to tyrant fathers
'Til their daughters die.
Star-cross'd lovers
In a comedy of errors
Tragically too late.
I tried my hand in the same vein:
Ask a pound of flesh
At your peril. Sly gentiles
Might just call your bluff.
M delivered the ultimate retort:
Ask a pound of flesh
At your peril. My geni-
tals weigh more than that.
More than a little forced, but funny all the same.
4 comments:
Since F and I (I feel like I’m a character in a Kafka novel) have studied literature and IGM is simply literate, he can be forgiven for not recognizing the technique of major minor (minor major?) early 20th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and, instead, calling "geni-/tals" forced. Forced? It's a device, man! Not true sprung rhythm, admittedly(how would you do that in haiku?), but must the end of a line coincide with the end of a word? Ha! No, it musn't; that's all. IGM's been modernized.
Frost, wool, and salmon
Autumn comes to Canada
Pumpkin spice latte
What's a girl to do?
Dull historical ramblings
Say farewell, my queen
A line coincide
With a word? No, it mustn't
I is modernized
(Uh oh, here we go
I'm a sucker for this stuff
Don't get me started)
Post a Comment