day moon
out of the subway entrance
a saxophone solo
Honorable Mention, 2017 Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Awards
Olivier Schopfer
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
白天的月亮
走出地鐵入口就聽到
薩克斯風獨奏
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
白天的月亮
走出地铁入口就听到
萨克斯风独奏
Bio Sketch
Olivier Schopfer lives in Geneva, Switzerland. He likes to capture the moment in haiku and photography. His work has appeared in anthologies, and numerous online and print journals. He is the author of three books: In the Mirror: Concrete Haiku (Scars Publications, 2018), So Many Miles: Fifty Senryu (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and Half in Light, Half in the Shade: Haiku and Senryu (Cyberwit, 2019).
Buskers have become commonplace in big cities. Mimes, magicians, poets, and musicians find places to work their talents where busy people congregate. How refreshing it must be in the midst of bustling humanity to hear a saxophone solo coming from belowground, when once it would have been strange indeed. Surely in this moment the poet is pleased, with a sense of “all rightness.” ...
ReplyDelete-- excerpted from the judge's commentary, accessed at http://www.modernhaiku.org/spiesscontest/spiessawards2017.html
Olivier's fine haiku above could be read as a counter-poem to Ezra Pound's "metro poem" (the “first published hokku in English”):
DeleteIn a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
For detailed comments on Pound's "metro poem," see "To the Lighthouse: Haikuesque Reading of Ezra Pound’s Metro Poem,” accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/search?q=pound+metro