Cracks in the Pavement

by Sandra Simpson

They realised, you see, that I’m a noticing kind of person – Miss Jane Marple

How many are we, do you think? The sort of people who notice particular moments as they tick by in a day – the sound of rain under tyres, the feel of sun-warmed brick under your hand, the taste of canteen tea, the colour of a stranger’s eyes as you pass in the street, the smell from a doorway…

Newcomers to haiku may think they’re up against it if they live in an urban environment, that their country cousins somehow have a greater advantage when it comes to inspirational moments. However, moments are here, there and everywhere in the canyons of the city – if we can develop our talent for noticing them.

The exemplar haiku included here have all been published in the 21^st century and are implicitly about man-made environments. In my reading to select poems, it was obvious that many haiku have ‘indeterminate’ settings. That is, the moment could be taking place in a rural or urban context. I have not, however, included haiku about the environmental and human degradations of a city as my hope was to focus on the small, everyday interests of urban life.

taxi horn
a cat-shadow leaps
into its echo

D W Brydon¹

summer rain
I bring some
into the bank

paul m²

the wrong way
up the one-way street
sunrise

John Rowlands³

The impact of Covid-19 and its consequent restrictions on human movement was a personal challenge when it came to writing haiku, as I’m sure it has been for many others in countries with greater restrictions than New Zealand has so far experienced. Instead of the many peaceful hours I thought I would have for my artform during the first lockdown in 2020, I instead found myself at a computer for most of each day, creating and facilitating (unexpected) content for my primary employer, and replying to the many emails that started to arrive, both work and personal.

Some days during that lockdown (March-mid-May 2020) I could feel my thoughts ping-ponging off the walls of my home, as well as around the inside of my head. As the route of my daily walk became commonplace I could feel my mind, and all of my senses, beginning to slide over the scenery. Sometimes on my return, I wondered what I had seen besides the cracks in the pavement.

a crack
in the pavement
yellow freesias

Owen Bullock⁴

My haiku practice has always included delving into memory to find topics and content for poems, and fortunately I have been a ‘noticing’ sort of child/adult so this was one way of kick-starting some writing during 2020. Mentally tucking away sensations and moments over the years has been as natural to me as breathing, long before I had ever heard the word ‘haiku’.

Sometimes past and present collide in surprising ways as when I discovered the ‘Santa’s Cave’ of my childhood (and my father’s childhood) had been resurrected in a museum. Heading in roughly that direction for a family event at the end of 2020, we made, okay, a rather large detour to visit the exhibit which comes out for Christmas, resulting in a lot of delight and memory surges for me, and amused bemusement for my husband. The Cave, which features several mechanical toys, started enthralling children more than 100 years ago and the young attendant said many people had memories triggered by their visit and she loved hearing about them.

santa cave …
the mechanical monkey band
of my childhood

Sandra Simpson⁵

As a child growing up on a farm, the visit to Santa’s Cave was made all the more memorable because it involved going to town, a place that seemed to my young self to be somewhere special – so many goods on display in so many shops, so many vehicles in the street, so many people … The fact that my parents dressed themselves and us up for these forays underlined that ‘town’ was very definitely different.

Since going to boarding school at the age of 13 – apart from one brief interlude – all of the rest of my life so far has been lived in towns and cities, both in New Zealand and overseas. And the magic of discovering a new town or city has never worn off.

each streetlight
with its own rain –
click of mah-jong tiles

Sandra Simpson⁶

city sunset
darkness rising
brick by brick

Quendryth Young⁷

a smell of hops
along the south quays –
last bus home

Maeve O’Sullivan⁸

But a city isn’t just a central business district, hotels, museums, theatres, etc. Neighbourhoods, the more chic-sounding quartier in French, radiate out from and encircle this hub. These suburbs and districts often operate as a series of villages within the larger whole, complete with their own markets and shopping centres, schools, churches, residential areas, etc.

afternoon nap…
a lawnmower
cuts it short

Dave Read⁹

a jumble of books
outside the old police station
the odd summer cloud

John Barlow¹⁰

rubbish collector
his plaited red beard
tied off with twine

Ron C Moss¹¹

Cities are sometimes themselves overtaken by growth and absorbed into a megalopolis, for example, the San Francisco Bay area (8 million people), Cairo (16 million), Tokyo (37 million), or Mumbai (80 million). Almost all our 21^st-century cities have evolved over time and through stages from hamlets. This evolution has, however, been bypassed in the ultra-modern cities of the Gulf States – particularly Doha, Dubai and Abu Dhabi – which as recently as the mid-20^th century were still small towns with few modern features.

Hiroshima Day
10,000 unblinking eyes
at the fish market

Earl R. Keener¹²

early morning
an archaeological dig
under the skyscraper

Megumi Shibuya¹³

in the shadow
of a street sign . . .
summer heat

Gregory Piko¹⁴

Haiku must engage the senses and while the ‘softer’ environs of the countryside may be thought to offer more opportunities, an urban environment can hold rich pickings if we open ourselves to the experience. Some of the topics are the same as non-urban settings – for example, weather, people, vehicles, trees, birds; and some are unique – for example, retail (shops, cafes), pavements, high-rise buildings, traffic lights, mass transit.

city street
    the briefest touch
        of a stranger’s hand

Vanessa Proctor¹⁵

subway car
the baby’s toes jiggle
all the way home

Frank Hooven¹⁶

Christmas streets
slowing down near
the chestnut vendor

Lucy Whitehead¹⁷

loosing her hair
in the middle of the office –
night falls early

Sandra Simpson¹⁸

Cities offer a chance to travel not only along the horizontal plane, but also – thrillingly –   vertically through space, even giving us the chance to experience a bird’s eye view of the man-made maze beneath.

crowded elevator
going up
we all look down

Andy McLellan¹⁹

5^th floor
how vibrant the city looks
from oncology

André Surridge²⁰

Cities are built within and around many different landscapes – rivers, lakes and harbours, on the coast and at altitude. These landscapes allow for something beyond tarmacadam, bus lanes and urban sprawl and are where interesting collisions can take place.

bushfire smoke
parrots crowd
the suburbs

Owen Bullock²¹

autumn —
a sheet of paper
drops between buildings

Dr Grant Caldwell²²

rush hour –
the honking of geese
on the move

Sandra Simpson²³

What interests me most about urban haiku occurs in the space where man-made surroundings and activities intersect with nature’s presence, whether ‘curated’ by way of parks and gardens or by having simply crept in and be doing its own, anarchist thing.

steeping tea
the time it takes
to lose a street to snow

Ben Moeller-Gaa²⁴

balcony planters
a yellow butterfly rises
floor by floor

Anne Burgevin²⁵

a thousand starlings
shape-shift above the high street
wet dusk headlamps

Stuart Handysides²⁶

Long may it continue.

References:
1: First place, British Haiku Society Haiku Award, 2019.
2: Another Trip Round the Sun: 365 Days of Haiku for Children Young and Old, ed. Jessica Malone Latham (Brooks Books, 2019).
3: Wales Haiku Journal, 2018.
4: From the sequence ‘Canberra haiku’, published in These Strange Outcrops: Writing and art from Canberra (Cicerone, 2020).
5: Echidna Tracks 6, 2020.
6: The Heron’s Nest XIII:1, 2011.
7: The Heron’s Nest XX:4, 2018.
8: Prune Juice 29, 2019.
9: The Heron’s Nest XXII:4, 2020.
10: Presence 67, 2020.
11: Kokako 33, 2020.
12: Kloštar Ivanić Haiku Contest, 2012.
13: A Sense of Place, The Haiku Foundation, 2018.
14: Cattails, April 2018.
15: The Dreaming Collection, 2011.
16: Kaji Aso Haiku Contest 2020.
17: A Sense of Place, The Haiku Foundation, 2018.
18: Presence 51, 2014.
19: Haiku in the Workplace, The Haiku Foundation, 2017.
20: Pulse, Jan 5 2018.
21: Presence 67, 2020.
22: Creatrix 50, 2020.
23: breath (Piwakawaka Press, 2011).
24: The Heron’s Nest XV:2, 2013.
25: Golden Triangle Haiku Contest, 2019.
26: Presence 62, 2018.

This piece first appeared in seashores 6, April 2021, but without the illustrations.

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