Haiku of the patch

I've created four haikus of the patch - one for each season.

Although I've adhered to the structure of  5-7-5 syllables, I'm not entirely sure they'd pass muster for the strict haiku purist.

Typically a haiku is an observation involving a fleeting moment in nature. These certainly concern nature, but are more attempts to evoke something about a detail - as depicted in the photo - than a moment.

Maybe I should  describe them as short poems with the structure of a haiku.




My favourite kind of nature photo are those that home into to a small detail. I think there's a certain 'haiku-ness' to this kind of photo.









After completing these it occurred to me that there are some pleasing parallels between a haiku and the blog itself.

The haiku writer is limited by structure of the poem. Similarly concentrating on a small area of countryside - the patch  - the mind is concentrated in a similar way.

This is video the I made earlier in the year - taking a photo once a month from the same spot. It seems to lend itself to a haiku commenting to the relationship between myself and the place.

You scan the horizon, your view an expanse of hill, field and sky, then you focus in on a detail, maybe a bird or a tree. Does your perceptual world contract to a shrunken fragment? No, it stays the same size or maybe even expands. As your attention homes in, so there is a mental blossoming – what was coarse-grained becomes finescale. Uniform Mondrian blocks show their true nature as a filigree of delicate tracery.

Like a baby in a pram, whose universe consists of its mother and perhaps some toys, it seems limited, but this is the canvas upon which the everything plays out – all the sights smells and sounds to feed the baby’s developing brain.

And this is what I’ve found when I’ve focused in on a ‘patch'.