For today’s Poetry Friday, in the midst of Poetry Month in the US and Canada, I’d like to share with you an unexpected delve into poetry I shared with Little Brother last week, following an observation he made during a regular walk with the dog. We were out in local woods, which are a carpet of wood anemones at this time of year, when he suddenly stopped and said, “It’s like walking in the sky.” I suggested he hold onto the thought and use it to create a haiku…

Later, back home, Little Brother told me all about the haiku writing in The Way of the Dragon, the third in Chris Bradford‘s Young Samurai series (Puffin Books, 2010), of which he is a huge fan. We found the book and read the relevant section together – and I appreciated how Bradford draws his young and I imagine mostly male readers towards the poetic form through humor as well as cultural inference. We then touched on Basho, and I suggested he take a look at Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho by Dawnine Spivak and illustrated by Demi (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1997); read Sally’s post about this wonderful book. He’s a big fan of Demi’s books too so he soon had it off the shelves and was engrossed… and having read it from cover to cover, literally, he then moved on to the titles mentioned in Demi’s biographical notes. Much later, our thoughts returned to our walk and our own haiku. I was definitely upstaged – here’s what Little Brother came up with:

Wood Anemones

Walk among the stars
Treading on the vast green slopes
Then the world flips round

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by “haiku nut” Diane Mayr at Random Noodling – head on over.

Posted by: Marjorie | This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2011 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Japan, Poetry Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: Chris Bradford, Dawnine Spivak, Demi, Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho, haiku, Poetry Friday, The Way of the Dragon, Young Samurai