Welcome to my weekly blog,  Friday Feelings!

For the next few weeks, it will my pleasure to share with you something I've recently discovered for myself and, indeed, for anybody who is interested, something you might consider doing in your own free time and in your own language.                                                                 

Haiku is originally a Japanese art form, a small poem of just three lines with a total of seventeen syllables, 5, 7, 5.   

In other languages around the world, haiku may be restricted to three lines, but not necessarily seventeen syllables.                          

The haiku is like a flash of lightning which literally throws a sudden flash of light on an observation. Reading haiku, and especially writing one, is a wonderful tool for anybody who wants to enhance his or her awareness of the little things we experience in life from moment to moment. The haikuist is the alchemist who transforms the moment into something rich and strange.                                                       

I owe my discovery of  haiku to my brother Gabriel, whose medium is the Irish language and who has published many haiku collections in both Irish and English. He says (and I agree with him) that the long vowel sounds of Irish lend themselves better to the haiku form than English.                                                   

Musically, Irish is more like a wind instrument (pipes?), whereas English is more like a piano. (As it happens, there's no piano in Irish traditional music. In the bad old days, they might have said, you can't run with a piano!)                                 

You can check out Gabriel's published books on haiku at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=gabriel+rosenstock

For myself, I decided that if the Japanese restrict their haiku form to seventeen syllables, and in view of the fact that English is not as musical as many other languages, I would create a form which would be the same for every haiku I write.

Why have a form at all? one may ask. Well to begin with, adhering to a form with limitations makes it easier to focus on your task.  I also feel that it has to do with nature; even the smallest organic unit in nature, the cell, has a membrane (or skin) to keep it together. Without the membrane, there would no life.

In my own approach, each haiku is encapsulated by a form which has no verb (to go/ to be, etc.) and no adjective  (good / sad, etc.).                                                                                                                

So there are only nouns ('things', concepts) and articles (a/the), and other little linking bits and pieces thrown in here and there to glue it together -  but  NO verb and NO adjective, reducing it to an almost 'cellular'  level. You might call it single-handed piano playing!                                                                                                                    

As well as that, no judgement. The judgement is left to the reader. Any temptation to make a judgement is constrained by the fact that no verb and no adjective can be used. That's why the series is called, From an ET's Logbook.  The haiku are like memos or observations from an extra-terrestrial's logbook, as the ET wanders around from place to place.

The third line is the punch line, which (hopefully!) creates a little surprise for the reader. The punctuation also follows a regular pattern for each haiku, making the 'shell' instantly recognisable:

A semi-colon after the first line;

a comma after the second line,

and a full-stop after the third line.

For the next few weeks, I'll include three new haiku for the Friday Feelings blog!   Here are the first three:

I

The purr of the hearse;

In the yew trees,

Chitchat of the birds.

II

The throb of the stars;

Under my shoe,

A daisy.

III


Breadcrumbs for the birds;
On the news,
Famine in Africa.


Greg, www.bluefeather.ie