Photo: Courtesy of Craig Brandt
Cool, cool evening.
White moon.
Autumn wind blowing.*
When I first read Uejima Onitsura’s* haiku,* translated into English in Haiku Inspirations, the word “autumn” swept me back to those years when that was my favorite season. I began with those memories. Once they quieted, I opened to imagining what Onitsura might have been saying about himself.
In northeast America, for over thirty-eight years I thrived in the brisk autumn air, surrounded by bold red and bright gold leaves—beautiful to startling against a vivid blue sky. From dusk onward, though, I retain no memories of a muting of light-diminished color. Now I return to those years to imagine a northeast evening, with a new awareness of the word “moon” that to Japanese haiku poets signifies autumn.
Comforted
It is a cool evening
as I walk.
The moon
is full
and trees are silhouettes.
In the wind,
my long hair gathers
in strands that lift apart,
loosening ear flaps
of a lined hat unsnapped.
I am freer.
When I look up
this time,
I know
how I am feeling.
In later years, a thousand miles south in central Florida, I met a new face of autumn … and gained a new memory. Autumn arrived quietly there. One day there were summer’s rich, varying tones of green, then overnight, a few buff leaves appeared. Field grasses tinged with dryness, bleached yellow and tawny, tilted, weakening, until perceptibly they lost a last trace of life. In this autumn, I more often was pensive, more often felt inner stillness.
Kigo has the lovely meaning of a collection of season words found in a saijiki, the dictionary of seven categories used by Japanese haiku poets to find the precise words for each of the four seasons. In Onitsura’s poem, “moon” is a word for autumn, and in Craig M. Brandt’s accompanying photo, the red leaves are “koyo,” the season word for the tenth month, October. Of these categories, two are about daily life, or events, and the remaining five about the natural world. The words or phrases are exact, as for autumn’s following season, early winter, kogarashi so nicely describes wind, from the result of autumn’s effect, as a “tree-withering wind.”*
I come back to Onitsura’s haiku as I imagine the poet may have perceived it.
Cool, cool evening.
White moon.
Autumn wind blowing.
In the evening, Uejima Onitsura steps outside. He pauses. He feels a chill in the wind, new this evening. Looking up, he notices the whiteness of the moon. Have I not observed a white moon for a while? He shivers. Summer has gone. He pauses. Yes . . . it is time to put on a sweater before opening the door.
My realization is, “Though time and years apart, simply being fellow humans gives us personal recall from which new consciousness may arise.”
* Uejima Onitsura, “Autumn Haiki,” in Haiku Inspirations: Poems and Meditations on Nature and Beauty (London, UK: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2006), 7.
* Ibid., 100. Uejima Onitsura is “famous for his philosophical approach and gentle humour. Onitsura once stated ‘outside truth, there is no poetry.’ Onitsura became a priest at the age of 73.”
* Ibid., 7. Haiku is a particular Japanese style of poetry. It has a strict form, but the advice of one late 19th-century poet to beginners was “to forget the old rules of grammar.”
* Ibid., 119.