the snow melted --
fences reappear
between neighbors
Heron’s Nest, XIII, June 2011
Adelaide B. Shaw
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
積雪融化 --
圍欄重新出現
在鄰舍之間
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
积雪融化 --
围栏重新出现
在邻舍之间
Bio Sketch
Adelaide B. Shaw lives in Milbrook, NY with her husband. She has published short fiction, children’s poetry and stories, haiku, tanka, haibun and haiga. She has served as an editor and as a contest judge for Japanese style poetry. Her haiku blog is: www.adelaide-whitepetals.blogspot.com/ Her haiku collection, An Unknown Road, won a 2009 Merit Book Award sponsored by the Haiku Association of America.
This succinct, one-image/one-scene haiku is well crafted; its emotionally suggestive power solely relies on what’s unstated but only hinted at, such as “between (good/bad) neighbors” that have an influence on how to clean up a cold muddy mess after snowmelt.
ReplyDeleteAnd Ls 2&3 work effectively on at least two levels, literal and symbolic.
This haiku reminds me of Robert Frost's Mending Wall, especially of the last line:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."