stone cairns
a faded cap drifts
downriver
First Place, 2015 Harold G. Henderson Awards
Debbie Strange
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
石塚
褪色的帽子
向下游漂移
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
石冢
褪色的帽子
向下游漂移
Bio Sketch
Debbie
Strange is a Canadian short form poet and haiga artist. You are invited
to view her published work at www.debbiemstrange.blogspot.ca and
www.twitter.com/Debbie_Strange. Keibooks recently released her first
collection, Warp and Weft, Tanka Threads, available through
www.createspace.com/5520311 and at www.amazon.ca among others.
Take our first-place winner “stone cairns” for example: In an- cient times piled rocks were called “stone men.” So cairns can also be seen as human effigies. In our time, cairns are mostly used to mark trails for hikers. But what of the faded cap drifting down the river? On a symbolic level, the hat is to the cairn’s permanence what the river is to transience. As the philosopher Heraclitus said, “You can’t step in the same river twice.” So the human-made trail markers are contrasted to the meanderings of the river, which is part of the natural world.
ReplyDeleteThe success of the haiku “stone cairns” lies in the contrast between the permanent and the transient. The hat reminds us that human beings, while we may appear permanent, like the “stone men,” are really transient and always changing like the river. This comes close to interpretation of the poem, but we must remember that for the poet the connection was “felt” rather than reasoned. Her/his task was to place the three— cairns, river, and faded cap—in juxtaposition so that we as readers might be able to make the same felt connection. And, maybe that’s enough. The rest, as Shakespeare said in another context, is “dross.”
In her new book, Voices in the Ocean, author Susan Casey says this regarding the great religions: “Even the great religions, with their millennia of wisdom, are more like gateways to unknown journeys than roadmaps of an entire terrain.”
-- excerpted from the judges' comment, which can be accessed at http://www.hsa-haiku.org/hendersonawards/henderson-judges2015.htm