Today we get both visual and literary art. First, reader Gravelinspector was nice enough to send not one, but four good cat videos. The indented captions are his.
Fat cat in a pot. Maru syndrome, one step further.
Fat cat escapes from the pot.
One wonders how this cat developed this habit?
A cat burrows in snow:
Kitten, part-filled bath. Exactly what you’d predict.
*******
And the site Jumbo Joke has a series of cat haikus. Here are two. They’re okay, but not outstanding; feel free to write your own below. If there’s a really good one, it may win a free, autographed copy of WEIT with a drawn-in cat. (Professor Ceiling Cat will be the judge; and the prize may not be awarded. If they don’t meet the syllable requirements, they automatically lose.)
My brain: walnut-sized.
Yours: largest among primates.
Yet, who leaves for work?
and
Your mouth is moving;
Up and down, emitting noise.
I’ve lost interest.
If you do well, you may get something like this (my autographed book for Aaron, who won the World Cup contest by guessing the final teams and score. Since he was a Germany fan, he demanded a cat playing soccer while wearing the German national jersey:
h/t: Gravelinspector, Steve
Cat in the sun thinks:
Who will I ignore today?
But he is hungry
If cats did not exist, the internet would be a sad, empty husk.
I once had a cat who loved water. He would sit in the bathroom sink with the faucet running and chill out while the water level rose around him.
Something similar, say about baseball or bluegrass music or setting a spell in the steam room or frying in cast iron or reading, this is pretty much all, when dead, I want pronounced over my ash or scratched into my marker / headstone.
String enthusiast
wrote Human in my obit.
I, Moxie, was loved.
Blue
As a long time haiku writer and contributor to haiku journals I’m forced to point out that no serious English language haiku writer today observes the 17 syllable “rule.”
The English and Japanese written languages are far too different to transfer the rules for one to the other. Japanese haiku contain 17 characters (kanji) not syllables, and the poems are written, starting from the bottom, in a straight vertical line.
What makes a haiku a haiku is the *feeling* generated by the poem, which elicits its image using a paucity of words that suggest, not state, the point of the poem. The point often being a feeling about the natural world.
Those who want to learn more about serious haiku writing can find much at Jane Reichold’s site: http://www.ahapoetry.com/haiku.htm
Those who want to see how far haiku form can be stretched should see this
book: http://tinyurl.com/p882aun
Example: a slight adaptation of Allen Ginsburg’s rendering of Basho’s most famous haiku.
Old pond
Cat jumps in
Plop!
I don’t doubt your expertise, but it seems clear to me that Jerry is not asking for instances of what you call “serious haiku”. What he’s asking for are instances of that well-known genre of light-hearted English-language poetry that does obey the 17-syllable rule and that (rightly or wrongly) is called “haiku” by its practitioners.
First, Japanese haiku (and by this, for certainty, I mean haiku written in Japanese in traditional form) do not contain 17 kanji, they contain an arbitrary number of kanji and kana with a total syllable count of 17 (5-7-5). Look at the original of Basho’s “old pond” if you doubt that: the first line has 2 kanji and 1 kana; the second, 2 and 3; the third, 2 and 1.
Second, Japanese is traditionally written vertically, but top to bottom (and right to left, if more than one line is used). But there is no rule that a haiku should be written on one line – I have a set of haiku cards in front of me and all are in 3-line form.
What constitutes an acceptable English-language “haiku” may be open to debate, but the form of the Japanese haiku is well-defined.
To clarify, when I say “syllable”, I mean the Japanese “on” – a single kana or kana digraph. And the haiku cards I’m referring to are Japanese.
Summer vacation.
Hotels don’t like animals.
Kitty boarding school.
———-
Feathery playmate.
Stalk and hide and run and pounce!
Why’d it stop flying?
I could write a lot of these.
The Box is Open
The cat must jump into it
Maru understands
I want outside now
Door opens, but I still sit
Foot comes from behind
Doz the red dot know
Dat I iz near? It comes cloze
Pounce! Where iz it now?
Dear Jerry,
A cat named Miss Kitty once owned me. It was always a pleasure to be at her beck and call. Queen Hili reminds me so much her. You posted about how Hili sits outside on the sill and won’t come inside until a human comes to get her. Miss Kitty did the same thing. Her eyes expressed the following:
Do NOT make me wait!
When will you take me inside?
This hard, cold sill hurts.
An aside: I’m a first time commenter. But I have followed your b**g for a long time. I enjoy visiting with you, other contributers and all of the commenters. Your articles and comments enrich my life.
Keep up the enlightenment!
Jane
Chasing after d-gs
Why evolution is true
I now understand.
This mouse is tasty.
Why don’t they feed me this meat,
since they own mousetraps?
Truncated Tennyson
Surgeon turns death grip
into a padded embrace,
now just red in tooth.
The cat is alone
The people have gone fishing
The bird fears the end
Just saw this on youtube- Do big cats like catnip?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tklx3j7kgJY
Despite 10 million years since big cats split off from small cats, many things remain the same
I am Ceiling Cat;
If I fall I land feet first.
What can your God do?
I reclaim my seat
On your lap. This d*g can go
Down there at our feet.
Sunlit window ledge
Silent dust motes dance o’er a
Pool of liquid fur
New and improved book
Has arrived with great pictures,
Have gifted old one.
Jerry, thanks for the picture and message!
This haiku is in praise of our 17 y.o. black female cat who still hunts for mice and voles, even with her bowls overflowing. I’ve been feeding three young strays by the back door, and they come religiously for the noms. More than once, our old gal would go catch something like a mole or field mouse in the garden and parade it on the patio, in front of their noses. She never eats what she catches.
“How undignified,
Young Meows beg for kibble.
Hungry? See mice run!”
Edit note: replace ‘kibble’ with ‘dry bits’.
The cat is napping;
Nap nap nap nap nap nap nap
Nap nap nap nap nap.
I think yours might be ze bezt.
Feed me, love me now
We both know you need me more
I poo on your floor
Window looks outside
Twittering birds in the tree
Cat twitches inside
In honor of our cat (a gray tabby shelter cat):
“Tabbyssinian”
sounds so much better than
“domestic shorthair”
Oops, one syllable short.
“Tabbyssinian
sounds so much better than a
“domestic shorthair”
I posted those videos weeks ago! you’ve been on too much cheery pie, Prof CC!
The cat and its prey
Chasing, pouncing and pawing
The red dot escapes
Not cats, but here’s a haiku series on evolution I wrote on Darwin Day a few years back. My friend and I often exchanged haikus
and following my status wishing everyone a happy Darwin Day, my friend wrote:
Forget Darwin Day:
Evolution’s disproved by
Spaghetti Monster!
I replied:
And yet it does move
Galileo did not say
But it makes my point
Three observations
And the two deductions
Darwin’s Magnum Opus
For he observed that
Species over reproduce
Observation one
Despite this he saw
Population stays stable
Observation two
Therefore there is a
Survival competition
His first deduction
Last observation
Individuals unique
Each is different
Those differences
They influence survival
The best are passed on
Evidence profound
ATP universal
DNA in all
Fossils abundant
Tiktaalik “transitional”
Tetrapod almost
And so you can see
Noodly appendage absent
Heresy, I know
Nicely done!
Lovely fur-balls purr
Sleep contentedly on me
This is sweet heaven