Haiku/Senryu, Photography (mine in Second Life)
by MNL

Senryu: Neighbors

Doesn’t love a wall
Left not one stone on a stone
Elves make good neighbors

senryu by M. Nakazato LaFreniere

I saw a great digital artpiece by Aneteya that would have been great for this senryu.  It just made me laugh.

Oh, today I’m drawing a bit of a blank.  I thought no poem today, the first time in 88 days.  So went off and read a book.  Thing is the Daily Post’s prompt: “Neighbor” has Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors” dancing in my head.  And then I just realized, I could use Erasure poetry to create a senryu to exorcise it.  Although I’m sure Robert Frost would never see my take on it coming, I hope it would make him laugh anyways.

I had meant to create a Second Life picture of a friendly elf near a broken wall questioning the need for walls as did Frost. However, I wandered into Innsmouth and encountered a monster breaking down walls, towers and buildings. So instead my elf is helping her neighbors fight the monster who hates walls. This surprisingy turned the senryu’s meaning on it’s head.

Maybe it’s a nice monster and just wanted to come over for a spot of tea but being big and clumsy, it knocked down the lighthouse and from there everything just escalated. We’ll never know because assumptions were made and the fight is on. Too bad.

I had meant a light-hearted picture like Aneteya but things happened and here we are.

The original Robert Frost poem used for my erasure haiku:

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Neighbors
Daily Prompts, Daily Post


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