Monday 14 September 2009

Silent Haikus

Does Beauty Inspire
Dreams and Experience of Wonder
Or is it Silence?

My Soul weeps and I,
No longer smothering its cry,
Mask its tears with ink.

If I am silent,
It is because I've nought to say
And cannot hide it.

Sunshine of my Love
I choose the Day but should Night Fall
I will be your Moon.

—okei


When looking for an image, I found the above picture on the right. It's the tarot card for "The Star". I don't understand tarot cards or how they're used, but apparently "The Star" represents listening to inner wisdom, renewal and light after darkness, which fits perfectly to the theme of these haikus!

40 comments:

  1. I like you poem, thank´s for sharing it. Love and Peace and Blessings!

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  2. Thank you IA! Surprise to see you here. :^) I'm glad you liked it... but it's supposed to be four separate haikus rather than a single poem.
    Love & Peace & Blessings to you too!
    okei

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  3. Well the 4 haikues was so balanced to become a poem...lol...I really like it very much...why I am here must be that I have become to another silence in me...I now can see more wider....lol....

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  4. Ahhh, you're too kind! Blessings!!!

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  5. breathtaking ... simply breathtaking ...
    and so, without my breath ... all I can do is smile...

    :)

    thank you

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  6. Om g, Okei,

    you outdid yourself here. I have goosebumps

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  7. Beautiful!
    When you don't talk math, you talk in beautiful silence.

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  8. beautiful. . . too bad i have no chance to watch the stars lately. but thanks for reminding me how beautiful the stars are, okei ;)

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  9. I'm bowled over by the Third! That's simply brilliant!!!

    When we have nothing to say...its human nature to mask it by jabbering away!

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  10. My favorite mathematician strikes again. *swoons*

    I guess it's the mathematician in you that has such a good feel for tempo or pace. Loved the haikus.

    And beautiful words... vous avez du talent, mon ami. Merci beaucoup

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  11. Wow! Thanks everyone for the super-positive reaction. That took me by surprise. :^) I'm delighted you all liked them so much!! :^)

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  12. I realize I actually mis-typed the third one so it wasn't actually a haiku the way I had it before, not that that bothered anyone, lol.

    I've corrected it now though.

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  13. I never noticed it was not a haiku... lol

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  14. It's just that the middle line was a bit long, 10 syllables instead of 8, and not as I'd originally written it... I think the haiku is supposed to be 5-8-5, so all corrected now... :^) If anyone did notice, they kept politely quiet about it, lol.

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  15. me too ... it's so cool the wayt the tree continues on through the ... on his home page .. through .. lol .. *words are not forming correctly for me at the moment* ... lol

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  16. wait .. no ... I mean .. at the top of the page ...

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  17. I think secretly that's why everyone liked my haikus so much... subconsciously it was actually the background that blew people away. It was one of my "Spanish Sunrises" photos which Shahrizat turned into a background for me.

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  18. The beauty is in the picture you took, dear okei. It was such a good material to work with.

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  19. It has to be said though, a lot of stuff in the world is "packaging"... sometimes people get a reputation and make a name in their field and people will buy their product regardless of it actually being any good... books by Dan Brown for instance. Music by many of the "top of the pops" today, etc.

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  20. Yes, a lot of stuff do owe their acclaim to the packaging they come with. But then sometimes you'd find gems too. Like your Haikus here. They would have been just as good with a plain white background, IMHO. The background is but a background.

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  21. Let's just say I was thinking on an unrelated note then... I'm sure reputation is very important in your work for example. Someone might build the most useless buildings but somehow makes a name for themselves, and just their name gets them the job regardless of the design? And I bet a tonne of those really beautiful buildings to look at from the outside are a real pain for those who use them, lol.

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  22. Okei, do you remember our little 'disagreement' over shape of Paranthas being important or not?!?

    Here, I'd like to point out...again...that 'Perfection' is what Connoisseures seek...in their fields, lol.

    I didn't find anything 'amiss' in the Third one....it didn't matter at all to me...whether there were 8 syllables or 10 or 20...so long as its meaning got conveyed right! Honestly!

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  23. That's so funny! My correcting that line so as to fit the form of a haiku was reflecting my desire for perfection as was your opinion that a paratha should be as near to perfectly round as possible in order for it to be a paratha. But for the "consumer" of the haiku, or the paratha, it didn't make the slightest difference!! LOL.

    And then I was commenting about the beautiful packaging heightening the enjoyment which was also something you said yourself. But the packaging often comes in the form of a reputation which can be very misleading. If one day for example you made a paratha that wasn't round, then because of your reputation for perfect roundness *wink*, your family and friends would be sure that you did it on purpose and would wonder the meaning behind it! :^) It would have to have some deeper significance, and they would search until they found some explanation.

    So, yes "form" is very important, as well as "content". In fact, that's one of the problems with aforementioned Dan Brown... no doubt he tells great stories (content), but from the few sentences I've read of him, I can't quite believe he was an English teacher let alone a famous author. J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, does both effortlessly, imho.

    But maybe "form" in cooking is more like texture, maybe appearance too if you insist, roundness lol, and the way things are so colourfully and beautifully arranged. A feast to the eyes, like a Spanish sunrise. ;^)

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  24. form only opens the mind. content fills it.

    Your poem is good okei.. no question about it!

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  25. that is profound! may I quote you for an upcoming design presentation this week?

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  26. Profound indeed! It left me wordless literally.

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  27. anytime. I am honored actually

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  28. Re: Dan Brown, I browsed through a copy of his latest book at the rail station and was just thinking, "what exactly is the problem with it?". The thought occurred to me after I got on the train... "it reads like a film transcript". (Looking later on google, I'm not the only one to say that, so I'm backed up by people who've actually read it!) I haven't got a problem with film transcripts. So if you read it with that mindset, perhaps it would be easier. But then you'd expect the film to be great and I don't know anyone who thinks "The Da Vinci Code" film was great... it only rates 6.4/10 on imdb.

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  29. Re: Reputation. Like I was discussing with Shahrizat below, reputation counts for a lot, especially in the artistic fields. The artist would dearly love name and fame, or even just fame, because the more people hear of them, then the more people purchase their product. Yet this runs contrary to the true creative spirit of the artist, and also to the inner joy of doing things for their own sake. And I was reminded of these thoughts by the following beautiful blog that whatever we do, its purpose should never be for money, for power, or for how others will think of us.

    "Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing it is not purely economic, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine.Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it -- whatsoever it is! ... Money, power, prestige, are uncreative -- not only uncreative but destructive activities. Beware of them! And if you beware of them, you can become creative very easily. I am not saying that your creativity is going to give you power, prestige, money. No, I cannot promise you any rose gardens." (Osho)
    http://lilleke80.multiply.com/journal/item/71/Creativity

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  30. Hugs to you too Cyn!!! Your quote "form only opens the mind, content fills it." not only says that it's "content" that really matters, but it also stresses the importance of "form", for how can one fill a mind that is closed.

    Conversely, though, if our minds are open, then there is no need for form, so form is needed only in so far as it gets attention. If I write something on a private sheet of paper, no-one will read it, but if I post it on Multiply, then perhaps someone will... psychically reading my sheet of paper is harder. ;^) But this makes the mistake of phrasing everything in terms of the "other", whereas as my comment about reputation said, it is really oneself that we should concentrate on, or again as this quote says.
    "Don't worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive." (Howard Thurman)

    So form must actually be to inspire our own creativity, to open our own mind. The restraints of the poetic "form" are well-known for being a source of great creativity! That which binds sets us free. That which seems to take away actually wakes us up at a deeper level. Still, I can't help thinking that it is others that contribute to my "aliveness", lovely friends like you, dear reader, who inspire and give your wonderful feedback and stimulate discussions which would never have arisen from merely keeping it on a private sheet of paper. So perhaps we should pay attention to what the world loves and needs after all?

    And "the other" is a source of great satisfaction to us too, so how to resolve the apparent contradiction between this and the idea of not basing our own satisfaction on things outside of ourselves. Or is there no contradiction. "Do good" is accepted by all, "do good for its own sake" also, but that means also "do not do good because it does you good"... now there's a difficult one to swallow, but if what you do is really for its own sake, then you hold no expectations. And we're back to that old chestnut of expecting everything (today is special!) whilst at the same time expecting nothing because the specialness is objective. A contradiction I grappled with and thought I'd solved in the comments to my June Dreams post, though I'm still not sure.
    http://jamintoo.multiply.com/journal/item/26/June_Dreams

    But now combined with the idea of my Everything and Nothing poem, perhaps I can make more sense of this...
    http://jamintoo.multiply.com/journal/item/34
    The objective everything is swallowed up into subjective nothing, and in doing so the subjective nothing becomes the objective everything. *goes away to have a think about this and a long chuckle at having confused everyone including myself*

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  31. eh, I was just thinking about chefs...


    You know how they say that presentation of food is really important... but you have really looked at this from all points of view here.

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