Chatterbox: In This Month's Issue

Old Cricket Says

the first wild geese
coming…
still coming

This poetic glimpse of nature is called a haiku. According to my friend Andrea Vlahakis, it is among the first poems written by Chiyo-ni, or Chiyo the Nun, one of the greatest practitioners of this ancient Japanese art, when she was just seven years old.

Born in 1703 in a tiny town called Matto, she was given the name Chiyo, which means “a thousand years.” As a child she worked in her father’s scroll-making business, where she learned painting and calligraphy and met many poets who came to have their work mounted on these long rolls of paper.
At the time, haiku were written almost exclusively by men, but Chiyo’s talent could not be denied. She became renowned throughout Japan, not only for her poetry, but for living the “way of haiku”—following a spiritual path seeking enlightenment in nature. Her compact poems evoke the reality of what is briefly present—the wonder of each fleeting moment:

traces of a dream—

a butterfly

through the flower field

In her fifties Chiyo became a Buddhist nun, taking the name Soen, which means “simple garden.” She wrote that she was “seeking a way for my heart to take after pure water, which flows night and day. Chiyo-ni wrote one of her most famous haiku when she went to draw water from her well and found a morning glory entwined around the well bucket. Rather than cut the flower vine, she let it be, and begged water from her neighbors. She writes as if we are present beside her:

morning glory—

the well bucket entangled

I ask for water

In the 1700s, in Japan, freedom and creativity were not encouraged in women. But Chiyo-ni opened a door, and because of her, other female haiku poets were beginning to be taken seriously, following in her path. And follow they did. Today, most of the haiku poets in Japan are women.

What special moment experiencing nature might you describe in a haiku?