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Alabama man thinks three lines can change the world - AL.com

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Important secret. I never really understood the appeal of haiku.

All that discipline and order. You have to count syllables, for Pete’s sake. That’s not poetry, it’s math.

Why 5-7-5?

A combination

To a lock inside my mind

I often forget

So I was wary when Scotty Colson -- Alabama ambassador of goodwill and chair of the committee overseeing Birmingham’s sister city relationship with the Japanese cities of Hitachi and Maebashi – hatched his haiku plan.

He was excited about it, as he always is, which is why he is good at what he does. So I put down my poetic prejudice and listened. He proposed a haiku exchange between the three cities, because human exchanges came to a screeching halt in 2020. It’s not a contest, he said, just “a way share and bolster” across the globe. He asked people to submit their own haikus based on shared COVID struggles.

Like this one, from Toru Suzuki in Hitachi, about the trouble of using so much hand sanitizer your hands turn to sandpaper. In the original Japanese it is:

koronakani

aretaruryoute

tsuyushigure.

In translation it is:

corona life

rough skin hands

though rainy season

Or this one, from Linda T. Roberson back home in Alabama, that requires no explanation here:

I bet you ten bucks

no one on this Zoom call knows

I’m not wearing pants

I’m starting to think I was wrong about this art form.

The whole thing started when Colson was talking to Toru Suzuki about disruptions of the program, about cancellations of youth exchanges and the burdens of living fully in a world in quarantine.

“After we finished whining about the state of the world I started thinking … this is a pandemic and one of the few events since World War II that that whole world has shared,” he said.

“My mom, who has lived through the depression, World War II, the Cold War, tough marriage, cancer and all keeps saying it is the worst think she has ever seen because “We are so alone and can’t go places.”

So he wanted to break the loneliness, and build connections with words. He’s asking for more, so all the cities can share them on their websites and beyond. Here’s his:

Separated Now

Pandemic summer of woe

Friends offer solace

From Japan comes Akira Suzuki with a haiku about finding the energy to beat this virus. It is:

kazokumina

coronataijini

moeteiru

Or in translation:

family member

conquest of corona

have a great enthusiasm

Colson would love for you to send him haikus of your own, to his email at scottycolsonblazer@outlook.com.

“Hopefully this will make us realize we are all in this together and intertwined in so many ways,” he said. “And to sit quietly for a few minutes and compose a simple little poem about how we feel and to share the spirit and feelings of each other.”

It does seem to have a sort of mystical power. All that wisdom or humor or feeling in three strict lines. It’s not confinement, it is freedom. As Dr. Michael Fleenor wrote:

Breathe in, then breathe out

One final eternal pause

Returns breath to air.

Or Gwen Amamoo on travel problems in “Ghana Sweet Ghana”:

The summer is here

I am ready to come home

No planes flying now

Perhaps Colson is right. We don’t have to speak the same language to understand the power of the feeling in these little poems. We just read them, and understand things we have in common.

Like this one from Bettina Byrd-Giles:

I'm about to lose

My mind up in here in here

Stores close at 7. Ugh!

Yes, they are as timeless as poetry itself. Like this one, another from Linda Roberson:

My gym is shut down.

For exercise I’m walking

fast to Krispy Kreme.

Surely, poetry like that can bring the world together.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register, Birmingham Magazine and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.

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