Houses encroach

I got a book on haiku today. It’s a leaving gift from a teacher I’ve never talked to before, and she didn’t talk to me then either, just left it on my desk. Squared and wrapped atop a pile of inky photocopies.

I never realised how referential haiku are. How dependent they are on context. One paragraph mentioned the first four syllables being an adaptation of a monk’s koan from nearly a thousand years ago. They didn’t talk about the fifth syllable and that made me think about it.

The fifth was e, and it was all about direction.