MahMight haiku journal: Lev Hart and Eric Amann

Lev Hart said:
“Please accept the following as my submission for the journal I might not like…”

What’s not to like when something unexpectedly awesome, unsettling so, pops through the virtual letter box!

rotting linoleum
a fairy ring encircles
our toilet

Lev Hart

Lev says about his haiku:
“Sometimes we find nature in unexpected places, as you observe in the call for submissions to Blo͞o Outlier Journal issue #3.

Perhaps in this haiku we can also find wabi-sabi in the rotting linoleum, the brief life of mushrooms, and the toilet's destiny, which is to fall through the floor.”

Lev says:
One of my favorite haiku is by Eric Amann, partially because it gets along fine with no kireji:

The names of the dead
sinking deeper and deeper
into the red leaves

Eric Amann
(1978 Yukuharu Grand Prize, Haiku Journal, judge: Shugyō Takaha)

Lev further says:
“I see the names on a war monument. Perhaps this image comes to me because red, fallen leaves suggest autumn, the season in which we commemorate Remembrance Day. Leaves and soldiers fall. Buried soldiers, like fallen leaves, become earth. Perhaps Amann's imagery implies that in time the monument too will return to earth, along with humanity as a whole—it is all sabi.”

Lev’s favorite quote from "Waiting for Godot" is the final stage direction:

'They do not move.'

His favorite quote from "Withnail and I" is the instantly memorable:

"I feel like a pig shat in my head."

Lev says that both of these quotes speak to the heart of the human condition.

NOTES:

Lev Hart, Calgary, Canada

Two more haiku from Lev Hart:

sickle moon
a north wind sharpens
the stars

Lev Hart
Ad Astra with Guest Editor Alex Fyffe
https://thehaikufoundation.org/haiku-dialogue-ad-astra-star-clusters/

long-dead stars–
I chart a course by
my ancestors’ light

Lev Hart
Ad Astra with Guest Editor Alex Fyffe
https://thehaikufoundation.org/haiku-dialogue-ad-astra-distant-suns/