Nine Joys

First posted on The Haiku Foundation blog on 15 March 2012, in response to an entry by Gene Myers on David Lloyd and his serendipitous influence on Gene’s writing life.

In the preface for his haiku book, The Circle (Tuttle, 1974), David Lloyd says that publishing the book gave him nine joys. He lists those joys as his home and children as his primary subjects, his gratefulness to haiku magazine editors who blessed his poems by publishing them, his thankfulness to prominent haiku translators Harold G. Henderson and R. H. Blyth, gratefulness for nature itself, haiku written by others, the “mystery of heaven” that resides in each haiku poem, the current era in which we live, the techniques of haiku shaped by our time, and publishing the book itself. These are abundant joys that anyone who writes haiku often shares. Here’s a haiku from David’s book, a poem that celebrates the joy of life, the joy of existence, as so many haiku do:

Duck feathers

On the lake’s shore—

Silent skies.