The Comfort of Haiku

The practice of haiku cultivates awareness of what is, and this awareness can offer a kind of psychological comfort for what ails us. Shiki, who suffered from tuberculosis, rarely addressed his condition directly in haiku.  Yet, his verses provided him with a more expansive lens with which to view his condition and the world, one that encompassed both light and dark.  I like this one:*

winter cold —

gulping medicine, saving

the tangerine for later

Here, the tangerine suggests a healing purpose as much as whatever formula Shiki was ingesting: beauty is medicine, too, and so is color, shape, and texture.  And then, what a comfort to hold a small, perfectly ripe tangerine, to peel it, expose the pulp, release the pungent scent, and taste the juicy tartness.  Even on his sickbed, Shiki noted the allure of all this.

African-American novelist Richard Wright (“Native Son”) was introduced to haiku through the translations of R. H. Blythe in 1959 and, during the last eighteen months of his life, he wrote hundreds of them.  Struggling to recover from amoebic dysentery and often bedridden, “he was never without his haiku binder under his arm,” writes his daughter, Julia, in the introduction to Wright’s collection, “Haiku, The Last Poems of an American Icon,” (Arcade, 2012).  “I believe his haiku were a self-developed antidote against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath…”, she observes.  Others have suggested that his passion for haiku was something more than therapeutic, that it offered the structure (and brevity) for deep contemplation, and for transcending the political and racial boundaries of his work.  I think that both of these suggestions are probably true — that writing haiku kept the streams of Wright’s creative imagination alive during a time of stress and suffering, and helped to allieve that suffering, as well.

*version by j.g.