From the palm, I chase after Sauron on my walker. (drawn in the waiting room at the doctor’s this morning)

Haiku to celebrate –

Movin’ Right along
Sauron’s Eye of Evil Laughs
He owes me five bucks.

During my nap earlier, I dreamt my sweetie was wearing an eye-patch and kissing me like crazy. Works for me! I didn’t find the eye-patch unusual at the time… I feel it was just costuming.

---

Japan Politician, Cultist Resort to Haiku

TOKYO – Both men faced desperate situations. One, a former prime minister, was being forced to give up his seat in Parliament after more than half a century because of his party’s new mandatory retirement policy. The other was a doomsday cult disciple convicted to hang for his role in the deadly 1995 attack on Tokyo’s subways.

They both decided there was just one thing to do — write a poem.

Demonstrating this nation’s millenia-old love of the poetic, former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone angrily announced this week he would relent to calls that he not run in upcoming elections, but warned in a haiku he wasn’t finished as a politician:

With dusk yet to come
Cicada persists in song
While it still has life.

A few days later, upon hearing he was being sentenced to hang for helping make the sarin nerve gas that was used by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult to kill more than a dozen commuters and sicken thousands more, Tomomasa Nakagawa, a physician, wrote this, which was read after the trial by his lawyers:

The autumn wind
In days of seclusion
Shadows move
People’s faces
Time does not return

Though the venerable custom of writing poems in times of severe stress — kamikaze pilots were known to write them before taking off on suicide missions — has largely vanished, few countries revere poetry as much as the Japanese.

Underscoring the weight given to poems here, Nakagawa’s were carried Thursday in all four leading nationwide papers — the Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi and even the Nihon Keizai, a business newspaper.

All major newspapers carry weekly poetry columns, generally soliciting contributions from readers and offering comment from experts. The haiku form of poetry, which limits expression to just a few syllables, has become famous abroad.

Poetry reading is also a major social event in Japan.

Tens of thousands of people send in short poems on a fixed theme in hopes of being among the select few whose lines are chosen for recital in the annual imperial poetry reading ceremony, which is held in the Imperial Palace and televised live nationwide.

The ceremony, held early in the new year, also features poems written by the imperial family, which has been a major patron of poetry since ancient times.

But the Japanese can be a tough audience — and the poems by Nakasone and Nakagawa didn’t win raves.

“From the professional point of view, those short poems and haikus usually lack artistic quality,” said Shunji Hioki, assistant professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo’s Aoyama Gakuin University. “You can’t write a good poem on the spur of the moment.”

He said Nakagawa’s poems — he actually penned two that were read by his lawyers — were particularly disappointing.

“They were not good as poems,” he said. “If you really put your true feelings in it, it reaches people’s heart, but these poems don’t.”