Haikus

I was in Brooklyn this weekend moving my daughter home from college for the summer and saw this mural on the side of a building…(my husband who has totally aced driving in NYC, pulled to a stop so I could capture these words, and miraculously we didn’t hear a honk to move on, perhaps the car behind us appreciated pausing to read it too!)

I immediately loved this poem and wanted to know more about the author. In looking it up, I discovered it is a well loved haiku poem by Richard Wright.

This poem is from a volume of over 800 haikus written by Wright called This Other World.

I had a lot of hours on the drive home, while Rob drove, to do some research on Wright. I learned that he is best known for his 1940 bestseller, Native Son and his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy. He was born in Mississippi in 1908, the grandson of slaves and son of a sharecropper.

His father left the family when Richard was 5 years old and his mother raised him alone and was determined that he achieve at least a ninth grade education, which was against the odds at that time. After leaving school and going to work labor jobs in Memphis, he noticed he deeply missed the opportunities to read that he had in school. So he asked a white coworker to checkout books for him from the library (black people were not allowed to use public libraries at the time in Memphis). His passion for literature led him to writing books of his own with a mission to end the Jim Crow laws of the South.

“I want my life to count for something,” young Wright told a friend.

His writing took him to Chicago and then eventually to New York City where he published his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, in 1938. His writing career was robust and his life certainly did count for something. I think we all need to read more of Wright (if you aren’t a reader, watch the movie Native Son which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019 and is now on HBO).

Julia Wright, Richard’s daughter, shares that writing haiku poetry was Wright’s favorite daily writing practice to get into the flow of writing. Julia saved all of his poetry and later published it to honor her father. She estimates her father wrote over 4,000 haiku poems, especially in the last 18 months of his life as a distraction from pain and illness.

Haiku is a form of poetry that uses a pattern of syllables: 5-7-5. The first line is 5 syllables, the second is 7, and the final line is 5 again.

It is fun to experiment with, but not as easy as it sounds. Wright encouraged his daughter to try it, “Julie, you can write them, too. It’s always five, and seven and five-like math. So you can’t go wrong.” She recalls, “he was never without his haiku binder under his arm. He wrote them everywhere, at all hours: in bed…in cafes and restaurants…on napkins…”

My friend Marilyn has been creating a haiku poem every morning as a spiritual practice. She might write about something in nature, something she’s contemplating, or a reflection on something that occurred. She recently sent me a beautiful haiku she wrote about compassion. She takes an idea and forms it into phrases of syllables, 5-7-5. This practice helps her simplify things, find clarity, and quiet her mind. We could all use more of that right now.

Try it for yourself this week. Take an observation and summarize it into 17 syllables.

It takes a little practice and wordsmithing, but creating a haiku slows us down to savor the present moment and it is way better than scrolling! If I can do it, you can…

KC to Brooklyn, across the country we go, to our city girl.

Storage unit full, and car loaded to the brim, fun drive home ahead.

Kids home for summer, soaking up the precious time, ‘til you launch again.

Thank you Richard Wright for your contribution to humanity, thank you to the unknown mural painter in Brooklyn, thank you Marilyn for reminding me that haikus are fun, and thank you for reading this and doing life with me!

Have fun with your haiku creativity,