Sunday, October 23, 2016

Butterfly Dream: Fireflies and Stars Haiku by Roberta Beary

English Original

my son and  i
counting fireflies
counting stars

First Prize, Penumbra Haiku Contest, 1999; The Unworn Necklace, 2007

Roberta Beary


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

兒子和我
計算螢火蟲的數目
計算星星的數目

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

儿子和我
计算萤火蟲的数目
计算星星的数目


Bio Sketch

Roberta Beary is the haibun editor at Modern Haiku. Her bestselling collection The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press) won a Poetry Society of America finalist award. Her haibun collection Deflection (Accents Publishing) won the Eric Hoffer and Touchstone finalist awards. Follow her on twitter @shortpoemz.

1 comment:

  1. Was I writing haiku? Plenty of people thought I wasn't. And they wrote to tell me about it. Sometimes I would try my hand at something different and use a kigo, a season word. But even then something personal would find its way into my haiku.

    my son and i
    counting fireflies
    counting stars8

    When I won the 1999 Penumbra Haiku Contest with this haiku, I was happy to read judge Elizabeth St Jacques' comment that my haiku 'expresses a strong sense of love and sharing between son and parent with a touch of humour'

    -- excerpted from "Go Tell It on the Mountain - The Personal in Haiku by Roberta Beary," which can be accessed at http://livinghaikuanthology.com/roberta-beary.html

    Technically speaking, Roberta's effective use of syntactic parallelism greatly enhances not only this loving relationship between mother and son, but also the contrasts between fireflies and stars.

    For more info. about parallelism, see my "To the Lighthouse" post, "A Rhetorical Device, Parallelism," which can be accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2015/05/to-lighthouse-rhetorical-device_7.html

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