The review by N.K. Singh includes a haiku by Yasuhiko Shigemoto that seems dark and curious to me:
Mountains laugh.
Never say Hiroshima’s mountains
are laughing.
Yasuhiko has a self-introduction on his site that gives some background to this perspective:
When the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 in 1945, I was working at a factory about 2500 meters north of the A-bomb blast center as a student mobilizer. I was fifteen years old. Fortunately I did not have a burn, for I was in the shadow of a structure by chance.
recalling the day he first saw the incinerated city of Hiroshima as a 15-year-old boy. “I walked across this bridge and even five days after the bomb, it was covered in charred bodies. I had to step over them, but there were so many I walked on someone. The river underneath was full of people too, floating like dead fish. There are no words to describe what I felt.”
No words but haiku. I couldn’t help but notice that he credits his interest in haiku to a chance meeting with an English school teacher imprisoned by the Japanese:
I met with HAIKU written by R. H. Blyth during the days of my Hiroshima University. I was surprised to know that he was absorbed in translating haiku into English at a concentration camp during the war. And at the same time, I felt much interested in his English translation of haiku and thought that I would like to write haiku in English or translate haiku into English as he he did. But for me, this was like a dream in those days. 　About thirty years later since then, I remembered what I thought about R. H. Blyth and haiku in my young days and began to try to tackle the work like a dream.
Spring hills faintly melting seem to smile
Summer hills of pale green seem to trickle
Autumn hills bright and clean seem all dressed up
Winter hills faintly sad seem to sleep
The origin of haiku may be spontaneous but its craft depends on a lot of structural and exacting norms. This process, which is the essence of the haiku art, has no spontaneity. It is like a jeweller’s craft after “the feeling” has been caught. In fact haikus represent a delicate balance between spontaneous feeling like what Zen called “Satori” and subsequent craft.
Kakvi to glasovi cuju se u mraku,
Nad nocnim poljem, visoko u zraku?
Ko li to pjeva? Ah, nista, sitnica:
Jedna u letu poludjela ptica.
Nadlijece sebe i oblake trome,
S vjetrom se igra i pjeva o tome.
Svu svoju vjeru u krilima noseci,
Kuda to leti, sto bi htjela doseci?
Nije li vrijeme da gnijezdo vije?
Kad bude hladno da se u njem grije.
Ko li te posla pjevati u tminu?
Sleti u nizu, u bolju sudbinu.
Ne mari za to poludjela ptica.
Pjeva o vjetru sto je svu golica.
A kad je umor jednom bude srvo,
Nece za odmor nac nijedno drvo.
Who is it that sings in the night
Above the dark fields, high out of sight?
Who is it calling? Ah, it’s nothing,
Just a crazy bird flying.
It soars above lazy clouds,
Playing with the wind, so loud.
All its faith in a wing,
Where does it go, what will it bring?
Should not it be in its nest now?
Wintertime is for settling down.
Who allowed you out into the gloom?
Return to earth now, safe from doom.
It worries not, this crazy bird aflight.
It still sings as it soars through the night.
When it tires from flying, that will be it,
Not a single tree, nothing left upon to sit.
This paper published in the Arab Journal for the Arts looks interesting:
“Tribal belonging in Pre-Islamic poetry (Between kinship and the awareness of kinship)” by Ali Asha, Department of Arabic, Faculty of Science and Arts, Al Hashimia University, Zarqa, Jordan.
The study looks at tribal belonging in Pre-Islamic poetry through studying some selected models of this poetry. In addition, considering poetry as the prominent factor for the cultural identity for Pre-Islamic community, the study investigates the social structure of the Arabic Pre-Islamic community and its integration in Pre-Islamic poem.
[…]
This kinship awareness made the poetic self try to create balance between power and truth, seeking “compliment� and “praise� and at the same time to resist the crumbling situation of the community that was exhausted by tribal conflict and dispute.