Haiku

From Darjeeling to Anaverna

Sep 24, 2025

In a world gone demented, ripping at the seams, Haiku can be a balm. I like to think of the master of Haiku, Bashō, walking all over Japan in 1689, writing Haiku on his journey, and the book itself becoming a poem about a journey [haibun]. He leaves Edo (modern-day Japan) to begin the journey, taking a boat to the docks of Senju.

The months and days are the travellers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them. Many of the men of old died on the road, and I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming. – Matsuo Bāsho, The Narrow Road to the Interior

Basho reaches a post station at Soka, finding himself in Muro-no-yashima a shrine to “Ko-no-hana-sakuya-hime”, the goddess worshipped at the base of Mount Fuji. Later, Basho and his companion Sora lodge at an inn in the Nikko Mountains. A month later, Basho and Sora leave to worship at another shrine at the Nikko Mountains.

Bashō walked all over Japan, writing this travel-ogue with Haiku strewn through it. I had a notion I’d do the same so I booked us to stay in all sorts of Ryōkan in Japan, mostly in lesser known spots but I cannot remember even one of the names of the places I intended to go, except of course Kyoto. That was the year of the Great Plague (apparently) and it got cancelled. The trip, not the Plague. Hence the Black-Out on the Japan trip. I had a whole project planned out to see Shinto temples and Buddhist monasteries but it was not to be that time in Twenty-Twenteee. I can’t even utter the word of the disease that was spreading in the Princess Cruise ship off the coast of Japan, it fills me with so much dread in hind-sight. The mere thought of the lock-up and I have my head in the loo. Well I am here to talk about Haiku, not all of that. When I lived in India before I had my little boy who is now quite big, I wrote Haiku all the time and tried to do it instead of snap-ing with my camera a lot. It got me to sit and be there.

I had a wonderful time in Benares, where I published my Travelogue, Pema and the Yak, with Pilgrims Books, which metamorphosed into That Time I got Lost Looking for Shambhala, when I published the re-write with Seagull Press, long after my father’s horror at the typos in the original book, his red pen corrections, slashed through. WHO was the editor? said my father. Gandalf, I told him. He wore a lot of rings, he’d long white hair, he’d fled English debt in the Nine-teen Seventees in a van, drove through Pakistan, and never went home again. He had a perfect Indian family, beautiful daughters who had moderate dowries, and things like that. He became Editor in Chief in Piglrims Books, Benares, Kathmandu and L.A. His name was Christopher.

Enough of that. I wrote Haiku all the time, and Pi, my Thai monk friend and Rumphet and other Thai Theravadan monks who studied at Benares Hindu University for their PhDeees became the subjects of some of these Haiku. When I returned to Ireland, to Anaverna House (which was to be an Artists’ Residency) it would be no time at all until I would be a mother but I did not know it. My Tibetan partner showed up at Anaverna and did somersaults up and down the Cooley mountains maybe much like Cu-Chulainn, but wearing a Tibetan Chuba[coat-shirt] and probably sporting the same long thick hair as our Cú-Chulann. A wee sprog was the outcome.

I had many Polish friends in Dublin and among them was a chap called Anatoly Kudryavitsky, who was in fact born in Russia to a Ukranian father and half-Irish mother. His mother was from Lublin and possibly ended up in a Stalinesque concentration camp and then settled in Dublin to get away from such dreadful things. Apparently, Anatoly started writing Haiku in Dublin, whereas I started writing them in India. In 2006, on my return from a long haul in India, on the brink of motherhood, Anatoly and I founded the Irish Haiku Society. In 2012, Anatoly did a wonderful job on an Anthology of Haiku called ‘Bamboo Dreams– An Anthology of Haiku Poetry from Ireland’ the first of its kind, published by Doghouse Press, edtited by Anatoly.

To cut a long story short, here are some of my Haiku, written during my most prolific Haiku-time in India– mostly.

Water rushing
through the paddy fields–
Morning soup

– Darjeeling, 2006

woman in white long sleeve shirt and purple skirt sitting on green grass field during daytime

With my nose inside

A rhododendron flower

I think of tea–

2006, Dharamsala

Picking blackberries
I catch the pale sun
in my silver bowl

bramen plukken
ik vang de bleke zon
in mijn zilveren schaal

© Siofra O’Donovan, 2006
Honourable Mention in the Samhain International Haiku Competition 2006 and published in Whirligig, Dutch Haiku Journal Eds Max Verhart and Norman Darlington, 2006