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It has been said that the best haiku emit “a melancholy gleam” that tells us life is passing. Because of their sweetness and short growing season, strawberries have come to symbolize the preciousness of each moment. That is why we sometimes close our eyes when tasting a strawberry—to make the moment last longer. Our winning and honorable mention haiku each used last month’s season word to celebrate the fleeting beauty of high summer.
Stevie Rosenfeld shares a moment of bittersweet beauty with wild strawberries that are “seemingly aware” of life’s passing. Nancie Zivetz-Gertler fills a “hand thrown bowl” with strawberries in order to remember the child who made it. Tracie Renee rides out a summer downpour “eating just-picked strawberries” that taste like the sun.Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.
You can submit a haiku for the current challenge here.
Summer Season Word: Strawberry
WINNER:
seemingly aware
of day’s end, wild strawberries
flirt with the last light
— Stevie Rosenfeld
Haiku use images to convey meaning and emotion. In fact, the use of “things” to suggest thoughts or feelings is the hallmark of the form. Haiku reveal that our inner experiences and outward perceptions are more intimately connected than we think.
How are the inner and outer worlds related? The answer is, completely! Separation is an illusion. At the quantum level, the dividing line between ourselves and the objects of our perception does not really exist.
That being said, as individual beings we experience ourselves as separate. Allowing for variations in longevity across cultures, humans live on average for about seven decades. A wild strawberry lasts, at most, for three days on the vine. Its brief season makes the berry seem sweeter and more precious to us, but it’s just a trick of perspective. A giant sequoia can live for 3,200 years, a bristlecone pine for 5,000. Compared to these, our lives are also very short.
Last month’s winning haiku breaks down the barrier between the human and natural worlds. The wild strawberries glow softly in the light as the sun sets over a field. Or maybe it is the blossoms that glimmer whitely in the fading light of dusk. Regardless, the words “seemingly aware of day’s end” place the poet and the strawberry on an equal footing. Each is aware of the passage of time.
The last line adds an element of play and gentle humor to the scene. What does it mean to “flirt with the last light”? The mild eco-eroticism of this suggests the perennial love affair between the summer sun and the season of growth and fruition. But the whole is tinged with a feeling of melancholy, because the setting of the sun means one less day of life.
Gazing over the field at sunset, the poet must feel that her life, too, is passing. The essence of the poem lies in the tacit acknowledgment of a shared mortality between the poet and the plant. Both belong to the Earth. And in belonging to Earth, they belong to one another. But that very belonging means returning to the Earth eventually. And so, some sadness remains, mixed inextricably with the tender beauty of the scene.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
your first hand thrown bowl
it’s holding strawberries now
i thought you should know
— Nancie Zivetz-Gertler
caught in the downpour
eating just-picked strawberries
I taste only sun
— Tracie Renee
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You can find more on June’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:
Summer season word: “Strawberry”
smaller and sweeter
this is what a life should be
the wild strawberry
Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the summer season word “strawberry.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.
Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.
*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “strawberry.”
Haiku Tip: Grasp with the Belly, Not the Head!
A Zen parable tells the story of a man being pursued by two tigers. One tiger chases him over the edge of a precipice, where he hangs precariously by a vine. The other waits below. As the man dangles from the cliff, two mice—one white, one black—begin to gnaw at the vine. With seconds of life remaining, he notices a strawberry hanging at eye level. He reaches out with his free hand and plucks it, popping it into his mouth. “How sweet!” he cries.
The story is allegorical. The two tigers are birth and death; the vine is life (literally, a “lifeline”); and the mice are day and night, signifying the inexorable advance of time. The plot of the story unfolds over a matter of minutes, but it signifies the passage of an entire life. So the moral might be summed up as: “Be mindful of each moment, because your days will soon be over.”
Like many traditional stories, this one conceals a kernel of earth wisdom that is lost on modern readers. I’ve heard it from the lips of dozens of Buddhist teachers over the years, none of whom seemed to know there was an ecological meaning to the tale.
The tigers, the mice, the vine—these details are there to attract the theologically or philosophically inclined, but they are not what the tale is about. A Talmud scholar once told me, “If you want to know the point of a story, look at where it ends.” Had I asked him about this story, he’d have told me that it must be about the strawberry, not about the man.
The strawberry doesn’t worry about birth or death because it is ONE with birth and death. The man belongs to the same planetary ecology as the berry, but they might as well be living in separate universes. There is nowhere for the strawberry to come or go from—no separate world to arrive FROM at birth or to depart INTO a death. The berry belongs to this world in a way that the man cannot fathom, and the reason is simple: he experiences the world as belonging to him, rather than he to it.
In Buddhist circles, the story is nearly always read as a lesson on impermanence. But that is the shallowest reading. In the last moments of man’s life, the berry hangs at eye level as if it were the point of everything. And, in fact, it IS the point. The strawberry is a kind of sacrament. A blessing he can receive only by eating it. A truth he can understand with the belly, but not with the head.
This is the real plant medicine. Not the kind that picks you up and spins you around, setting you down with a new perspective on life. The berry doesn’t work that way. It has no psychoactive properties. It can’t be bothered to correct your misunderstandings or open the doors of perception. It doesn’t change your mind. It doesn’t even “matter” in the usual sense of the word. It isn’t big. Doesn’t occupy a particularly significant niche in the greater scheme of things. It says simply, “Everything that eats is also eaten. This is the truth of all life.”
A word about strawberries: In the northeastern United States, strawberries are harvested from June to mid-July. In warmer climates their growing season may extend throughout the summer into early fall. Wild varieties appear a little earlier, producing berries that are smaller and generally sweeter than their store-bought cousins.
Season word editor Becka Chester writes: “The strawberry is a perennial member of the rose family of plants and is native to the Americas. Encyclopedia Britannia states, ‘the strawberry fruit is not a berry or a single fruit but is instead a greatly enlarged stem end that contains many partially embedded true fruits (achenes), popularly called seeds.’ The strawberries’ small, white flowers have often been associated with purity and innocence. Shaped like a heart, they have been linked to Venus and are associated with romantic love.”
Strawberries were introduced to Japan during the 19th century, at which time haiku poets began using them as a summer season word. The modern poet Suzuki Masajo (1906-2003) pioneered haiku about love—a theme previously reserved for the 31-syllable tanka. Here is one of her most famous poems, written when she was 63, followed by her comment on it.
still longing for love
I pop a ripe strawberry
right into my mouth
“A red round strawberry reminds me of my first love. After such a long time, it might sound strange to think about first love, but sometimes I have this mischievous temptation to fall into a new love.”
