Haiku poems on Twitter

The Guardian has the story of Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, who announced his resignation on Twitter with a haiku. “Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku,” he tweeted earlier this morning, going on to apply the five/seven/five-syllable rule of the Japanese poem to his situation:

“Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more.”

Schwartz doesn’t include the seasonal reference which is key in the traditional Japanese haiku  but The Guardian thinks he should be forgiven for this – and, as the paper notes, “perhaps there’s a hint of winter in the gloom of the financial crisis stalling those customers, in the finality of his last line, drumming in its point with a flurry of single syllables”.

 The paper exhorts others, for instance British Gas, to follow the example. “Instead of a dry announcement,
British Gas could have told us it was”:

“Warming up winter
With money in your pocket
As gas prices fall.”

Maybe these poems apply to the formal rules of Haiku, but compared to other Haiku poems they still have some way to go.  For instance, consider these poems:

The spirit of death is one,
the spirit of life is many,
When God is dead religion becomes one.

The blue of the sky longs for the earth’s green,
the wind between them sighs, “Alas.”
Day’s pain muffled by its own glare,
burns among stars in the night.

The stars crowd round the virgin night
in silent awe at her loneliness
that can never be touched.

The cloud gives all its gold
to the departing sun
and greets the rising moon
with only a pale smile.

He who does good comes to the temple gate,
he who loves reaches the shrine.

Flower, have pity for the worm,
it is not a bee,
its love is a blunder and a burden.
(Rabindranath Tagore)

They do not adhere strictly to the formal rules, but are nonetheless of considerable beauty in their imagery.

And here some classical japanese ones  (Basho):

The first soft snow!
Enough to bend the leaves
Of the jonquil low

Fallen sick on a journey,
In dreams I run wildly
Over a withered moor.

Poverty’s child -
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.

No blossoms and no moon,
and he is drinking sake
all alone!

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