Poetic Musings: River and Sea Haiku by Kala Ramesh

I dip my feet

in a river the river
joins the sea

Moongarlic, 4, May 2016

Kala Ramesh

Commentary: The way I see it, three totally different images weave in and out of a 12-word poem:

I dip my feet

in a river

in a river the river

the river

joins the sea

Think back to the linking equation mentioned earlier (verse C links to preceding verse B and shifts away from verse A). In this poem, we have the feet at one end of the equation (A) and the sea at the other (C). On a larger scale, one small life (feet) is being connected to something larger, the cosmos (sea), through the steady flow of existence (river). By overlapping, the images create the necessary resonance: The narrator and her feet don’t literally join the sea, but the resonance shows how everything is connected, in the same way that “petals on a wet, black bough” provide a new way to see the crowd’s faces in Ezra Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro”—another poem that relies on superposition for its impact.

-- -- excerpted from "To the Lighthouse: Link and Shift: The Leap in Our Understanding by Kala Ramesh"