brushing off sand
I walk what's left
of the pine dunes
my time here passes by
like the birds overhead
Ribbons, 5:2, 2009
H. Gene Murtha
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
掃除沙子後
我行走在松林沙丘
所剩之處
我的時間流逝
就像頭頂上的飛鳥
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
扫除沙子后
我行走在松林沙丘
所剩之处
我的时间流逝
就像头顶上的飞鸟
Bio Sketch
H.
Gene Murtha, a naturalist and poet, sponsored and judged the first
haiku contest for the inner city children of Camden, NJ., for the
Virgilio Group, of which he was a lifetime member. He was widely published
for his work in haikai literature from the USA to Japan.
Everything here is shifting. Initially it is the sand, which is presumably being brushed from the speaker’s clothes. Perhaps he has lain down and it has stuck to his pants, his shirt, the palms of his hands. He, too, is in motion now, ‘walk[ing] what’s left of / the pine dunes’, the sand possibly slipping beneath his feet. The odd enjambment at the end of line two encourages the reader to wander just what has been reduced and is about to be cut off. Immediately it is ‘the pine dunes’. The tanka acknowledges this environmental degradation. There is a subtle sense of complicity; the speaker is also an agent of erosion, his very presence a small disruptive force. He is part of a shifting cycle of loss which includes all around him: ‘my time here passes by / like the birds overhead’. The concluding simile is quietly appalling; no mere figure of speech, it seems to embody the prospect of shared annihilation. The natural world is no longer a measure of life’s abundance. It, too, may pass...
ReplyDelete-- excerpted from "First Warm Day – H. Gene Murtha’s Bird Haiku by Jo McInerney," accessed at https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/06/dark-wings-of-night-first-warm-day-h.html