Dale Chihuly The Nature of Glass at the Phoenix Desert Gardents, Part III Night Falls

This is the final installment of the Dale Chihuly Nature of Glass Exhibit at the Phoenix Desert Botanical Gardens. Darkness falls quickly in the desert. It was easy to imagine all kinds of movement when the light played on the glass sculptures.

Below is a brief discussion of the Haiku Poetry format.

Please enjoy the pictures and the haiku.

Past these sentinels

Silent red undulating

For the brave pass here

.

Fast falls the darkness

Tall stands the shimmering glass

Imagine and see

Desert river dry

Boat of blue muddled dreams

Silently glow bright

.

If the desert dreams

It dreams violent coldest blue

For you, the special to see

.

Night desert terrors

Such writhing beauty so fierce

In fear lie awake

.

There be ghosts about

Looming from the desert floor

White spirits drift up

.

Some English teacher, somewhere deserves an accolade for making me write Haiku poetry when I was in school. I find it a nice way to express emotions.

The poems below each picture are in the haiku format.

The Haiku Poetry form is from Japan. It is a deceptively simple poetry verse that has three un-rhymed lines of five, then seven, and then five syllables. Originally it was to tell a story or create a feeling of the seasons.

It is not as easy to create as you would think. They look like simple little poems but in order for the words to invoke a feeling the words must be meaningfully placed together as well as having the correct syllables.

The haiku was named by a writer named Masaoka Shika in Japan. He named this form of poetry at the end of the 19th century.

Modern haiku may not follow the theme of the seasons nor may not follow the strict syllable counts. There are many different forms of haiku in Japan.

The first recorded European to use the haiku format was a Dutchman named Hendrik Deoff who was a Dutch Commissioner in Nagasaki in the first years of the 19th century. The haiku was at first dismissed by serious poets in Europe and the West.

However, it has come into its own since that time. It is a recognized and celebrated poetry style. There is an alternative newspaper in Albuquerque New Mexico that has a well celebrated Haiku Contest nearly every summer. My step-daughter-in-law won one year!

The reading and performing of haiku is very special. The accented syllables and the dramatic pauses when reading the sparely written poetry make the performance of haiku to be quite moving.

As you can imagine the haiku is virtually impossible to translate into another language. You man translate the words but it is unlikely that all the words in one language will translate to have the same number of required syllables in another language.