When I filled out my AFR, I remembered that I had done a Haiku presentation at Okemo last year and never gotten around to publishing it on the Istvan Bierfaristo site, so I finally made a page for it: KontraŭMilitaj Hajkoj or Anti-war Haiku. They're probably really senryu, mostly, but Americans don't usually know the difference. I wrote them during the fanatical Bush runup to the war in Iraq, when it was clear that the administration was ignoring every possible path to peace. The last few haiku are called "peace haiku". I wrote them after the war had started and didn't feel comfortable writing explicitly against the war. But as I watched the war unfold... As I watched the news images of little children blown up and maimed in the war, I thought of my own children, safe and sound, their world going on unchanged while mine was so different. I tried to write haiku that I could imagine myself and the father of a child there thinking at the same time.

malhela ĉambro
kuŝe fil' ade spiras
ankoraŭ vivas

dark room
son lying down, breathing
still alive

I was glad to get them posted.


StevenBrewer