English Original
I dip my feet
in a river the river
joins the sea
Moongarlic, 4, May 2016
Kala Ramesh
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
我把雙腳浸入
河水中, 一條河
流入大海
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
我把双脚浸入
河水中, 一条河
流入大海
Bio Sketch
Kala Ramesh has published more than one thousand poems comprising haiku, tanka, haibun, & renku in reputed journals and anthologies in Japan, Europe, UK, Australia, USA and India. Her work can be read in two prestigious publications: Haiku 21: an anthology of contemporary English-language Haiku (Modern Haiku Press, 2012) and Haiku in English - the First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton 2013). She enjoys teaching haiku and allied genres at the Symbiosis International University, Pune.
The way I see it, three totally different images weave in and out of a 12-word poem:
ReplyDeleteI 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," accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2022/05/poetic-musings-river-and-sea-haiku-by.html