Between two worlds: A review of Cyndi Myer's Haiku
©Pixabay
falling leaves —
the cemetery
almost full
© Cyndi Myers
Early this year, I was surfing the web and I came across this funny yet disturbing piece of information:
"Dying is illegal in Longyearbyen, Norway because the town's small graveyard stopped accepting bodies after discovering the permafrost prevented the bodies from decomposing."
The first thing that comes to my mind after reading the haiku above is the situation of this town earlier mentioned. I laughed a bit at the weirdness of the situation but soon recollected myself in a meditation on the bathos that goes side by side with the humour.
I asked myself, what is the haijin seeking to address in the haiku? what does the leaves and the cemetery represent? Can the cemetery ever be full of leaves, same way a tank can be full with water? so to answer myself and consequently, readers of this review, I have addressed each question with enough appropriateness — at least to myself.
To begin with, there are two keywords in this verse:
i. the active verb that brings the thing event into view — falling.
ii. the word that signifies a sense of danger in the verse — full.
An essential part of a tree is the leaves, although its presence in most cases is not as important as the branch or the roots, however, a leafless tree is considered a dead tree. when leaves "fall" the tree gradually begins to get naked of it's decorations. On the figurative front, however, the poet's metaphoric essence is the juxtaposition of dropping leaves with dying humans.
We can digress further on the place of humans in the symbolic ecosystem "tree" from which leaves can drop as portrayed in the verse. In cases like this, I do wish I were a biologist. I could have given the right statistics of the interrelationship of every living thing and man. But as I am not, I still would give my submission on the matter thus:
humans are the crown of living existence, and their presence in the ecosystem is significant, in curbing the wildness and the formlessness that often characterize their absence.
There are many things that causes the fall of leaves: Weather/seasonal changes, intrusion of animals, human activities et all. Nonetheless, every leaf is destined to "fall" at a point in time. Our cursor points at death, in this powerful haiku.
Now to consider the second word "full" as used in the verse.
Unlike the cemetery in the poet's worldview, the earth can never be "full" or filled with dead humans. The world wars, Constant bombings here and there, pogroms, civil wars, and every form of "cide" that draws many humans to their graves set a minder to us all that many are gone and many will still "fall", and that the Earth's appetite for dead bodies is insatiable. But, is the graveyard full? Can the graveyard be full? Or is the situation in Longyearbyen a prototype of what will later become a general trend? Maybe this should mark the beginning of personal reflections . . .
Perhaps, it would be helpful to state that as some leaves drop, other leaves emerge, replacing the "lost" leaves. Statistically, Birth rate is always higher than death rate. This seems to redirect our thoughts to the fact that their is what I would call "life - circulation", a natural provision made to replace "fallen" leaves with new leaves and on and on.
Had it been in my power to rewrite a work of art, I might probably end up with something like:
falling leaves —
the cemetery
never full
© Oni Oluwatomiwa Olanrewaju
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