The Friday Influence

3 Haiku – Jorge Luis Borges *

They have said something to me,

the afternoon and the mountain.

Already, it is lost.

**

The antique sword

dreams of its battles.

Another is my dream.

**

Is it an empire

that light dying down

or a firefly?

**

This week on the Influence – Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges has been a kind of spiritual/writing mentor for me the past couple of years.  He prided himself in being a better reader than writer, and prized the pleasure of reading above any fame and notoriety to be gained in the writing world.

In the introduction to a book of prose poems, he defended himself from those who would bicker over whether the pieces in the book were poems or not, that they were poems to him, some of which took their form in prose.

I took this as permission to take on the prose poem in my own fashion.  But more than that, it gave me permission to own my sense of what a poem is, that it could be many forms aspiring to one spirit.

Which is how I take on haiku.

You take on a form and keep writing until you have a relationship with it, until it is yours.  Whatever gets it out of you, gets you writing, gets it written.

My challenge today is more of an homage.  Here’s to Borges and getting it written.

***

3 Haiku – Jose Angel Araguz

shadow of a branch

across the page

writing

**

the tension

between two

buttons

**

down moon-paved roads

cold morning

walks

**

Happy walking!

J

* translation by Jose Angel Araguz (word to your Obra Poetica!).