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“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought”.
Here are a few of the wonderful *Haiku poems attributed to Bash (they may not have retained their purity in the English translation, but you get the flavour of them):
An old pond!
A frog jumps in-
The sound of water.
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The years first day
thoughts and loneliness;
the autumn dusk is here.
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Poverty’s child –
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.
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A weathered skeleton
in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife
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*DEFINITION OF HAIKU: Haiku is one of the most important form of traditional Japanese poetry. Haiku is, today, a 17-syllable verse form consisting of three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Since early days, there has been confusion between the three related terms Haiku, Hokku and Haikai. The termhokku literally means “starting verse”, and was the first starting link of a much longer chain of verses known ashaika. Because the hokku set the tone for the rest of the poetic chain, it enjoyed a privileged position in haikaipoetry, and it was not uncommon for a poet to compose ahokku by itself without following up with the rest of the chain.
The name Basho (banana tree) is a sobriquet he adopted around 1681 after moving into a hut with a banana tree alongside. He was called Kinsaku in childhood and Matsuo Munefusa in his later days.
