Friday, November 10, 2017

Carpe Diem weekend-meditation #6 Kamishibai challenge "sunflower"


!!! Open for your submissions Sunday November 12th at 7:00 PM (CET) !!!

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Welcome at a new weekend-meditation here at our Haiku Kai. This week's weekend-meditation I have a nice challenge for you ... a haibun ... Maybe you are a long-time participant of CDHK and than you will remember that we had a special feature titled "Kamishibai". That special feature was about haibun (prose and haiku). Let me tell you a little bit more about "Kamishibai" first.

Kamishibai (紙芝居), literally "paper drama", is a form of storytelling that originated in Japanese Buddhist temples in the 12th century, where monks used emakimono (picture scrolls) to convey stories with moral lessons to a mostly illiterate audience.
Kamishibai endured as a storytelling method for centuries, but is perhaps best known for its revival in the 1920s through the 1950s. The gaito kamishibaiya, or kamishibai storyteller, rode from village to village on a bicycle equipped with a small stage. On arrival, the storyteller used two wooden clappers, called hyoshigi, to announce his arrival. Children who bought candy from the storyteller got the best seats in front of the stage. Once an audience assembled, the storyteller told several stories using a set of illustrated boards, inserted into the stage and withdrawn one by one as the story was told. The stories were often serials and new episodes were told on each visit to the village.

Kamishibai performer
It's similar with haibun, but there is a difference. In haibun the poet describes his / her "adventures", like e,g, Basho did in his "Oku No Hosomichi" (Small Road Into The Deep North) in words, the Kamishibai-performer tells stories.

I love to challenge you this weekend to create / write a haibun, but there are a few rules:

First I will give you a haiku which you have to use, of course you can include a few other haiku created by yourself, but the given haiku (or an interpretation or revision of that haiku) you have to use.
Second The classical rules, for haiku, are to be used. Those rules you can find above in the menu in CD Lecture 1
Third Your haibun may have a maximum of 250 words (including the haiku).

"broken" sunflower

To give you a little bit more 'freedom' I have two haiku for you from which you can choose:

blooming sunflowers
reaching for the early light of the sun -
birds praise their Creator

© Chèvrefeuille

Or this one, also created by me:

broken sunflower
seeds spread all around his stem;
bringing joy next year

© Chèvrefeuille

Well ... I hope you all have a wonderful weekend full of inspiration. Enjoy your weekend. This weekend-meditation is open for your submissions next Sunday November 12th at 7:00 PM (CET) and will remain open until November 19th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode, another nice quatrain written by Omar Khayyam, next Sunday around 7:00 PM (CET).


3 comments:

  1. How fascinating! I'm really enjoying the background information and research you offer, - I myself wouldn't know where to even begin, so this is like an open doorway into a new adventure. Thank you.

    And if I'm understanding this correctly - we're to consider writing a haibun, incorporating either/or of your haiku, into the story, and either supplemented with others, i.e. ours in response?

    Wonderful idea/prompt - and gorgeous topic - sunflowers!

    ReplyDelete