Saturday, March 16, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Yellow Bird Haiku by Peggy Heinrich

English Original

breezy morning
the gliding yellow bird
turns into a leaf

Peeling an Orange

Peggy Heinrich


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

有微風的早晨
滑翔的黃色小鳥
變成了葉子

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

有微风的早晨
滑翔的黄色小鸟
变成了叶子


Bio Sketch

Peggy Heinrich's seven books of poetry include most recently, Forward Moving Shadows, a collection of tanka with photographs by John Bolivar. The same pair published, via Modern English Tanka Press, Peeling an Orange, with Heinrich's haiku and Bolivar's photos. A native New Yorker, Peggy resettled in Santa Cruz, California, after many cold winters in New York and Connecticut.

1 comment:

  1. Emotionally effective use of a centuries-old poetic device, mitate (taking one thing for another) as shown in the following haiku by Arakida Moritake (1472-1549):

    The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
    A butterfly
    (Pound, 1914, p.467).

    The good context-setting L1 and the shift, tonal and thematic, in L3 lift the haiku up a notch. Well done.

    note: In the future "To the Lighthouse" post, Haiku as a Form of Super-Position, I will give an in-depth analysis of the technique mentioned above.

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