sacred haiku

“Haiku is a form of poetic expression that captures slices of experiences, feelings, and imaginative musings of everyday, ordinary existential unfoldings. Traditionally, in its Japanese form, it is set in a lyric format of 5-7-5 patterns, or 17 syllables.  And yet, haiku is so much more than a strict adherence to this rubric. Indeed, contemporary haiku takes form in a more incisive style. As short verses, haiku poems comprise a season word called a kigo, although contemporary haiku in the west allows for more spontaneity and surprise. Haiku is paradoxically both excessive in symbolic meaning and concisive in linguistic construction."

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why sacred haiku? 

“As a contemplative immersed in the marketplace, haiku provides me with a “poetics of space”, to borrow the titular phrase of Gaston Bachelard, in which my spiritual eye, which is entirely bound up within my incarnational being, finds its own language of the sacred, something of the unsayable. Within its tightly constrained literary form, haiku offers me a surface upon which I can write something of the intensity of life - that something which eludes my ability to give it full bodied articulation; that something that lies beyond all words and images.”
~ Deborah Rasa