falling apple --

       the branch sweeps into

       a new balance

       ---

       Max Verhart (1944-2018). From "Shiki Kukai" (September, 2006).

       Haiku are often highly visual, using nouns to cause the reader to imagine concrete objects in their mind's eye and thereby helping them to "enter" the haiku and experience it themselves as the poet did. In the above haiku, we immediately enter the poem in movement with our eye locked onto the apple as it plummets through the air. The dash acting as a caesura after "apple" also suggests the continuation of the movement -- one could not use an ellipsis here! Then we look to where the apple came from and spy the branch, where we again experience movement as the branch sweeps upwards in reaction to the weight that it has shed in the form of the apple. Finally, we watch in awe as the branch swings up and down in smaller and smaller movements as time goes by until its angle and its weight are reconciled. Haiku often capture a moment, but this haiku successfully captures an extended moment which allows us to viscerally feel the passage of time. The word "balance" might make one think of physics and the apple of Isaac Newton. The poem in its entirety also seems to reflect on life, with losses happening from time to time, but we always find a new balance to help us go on living.

       Selected and commented on by Dhugal J. Lindsay

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