固いあめ
気をつけて,すずめ！
機微葉陣で鵜二散らす。
That be my extra-credit project for the last class tomorrow. It’s a haiku from back before I retired from poetry. The gist of it is, “Sparrow, be careful: you’re dropping millet seeds on the sidewalk.” It has something to do with treating all life forms the way you would treat your most intimate companions. Or, like, a bird shat on me one time; I don’t remember.
Anyway, it’s always been my contention that we need more words to accurately describe the rich variety of rain out there, like the Esquimaux (don’t) have for snow. What’s the stuff that accumulates on leaves and then falls in bigger drops, so that you get wetter under the trees than out in the open? What do you call the noise of smallish drops on a pile of leaves, which sounds a little like bacon frying? What’s the word for a cloud that’s so low you get wetter the more you move? Or for how the air feels when it’s been raining and will soon again? The scatter of spat-out millet hulls is just one more iteration of rain’s rich pageant. During my mom’s visit this week, we’ll be lucky to be thusly spat upon.
And yes, it is seventeen syllables, and three metrical movements, with a strong caesura after the exclamation point and an implied one after jindoo (sidewalk). So suck it, haters.
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You Seattletonians should be the ones to start giving names to different types of rain. My favorite, and invention is Ssssaaaaa, the deafening downpour rain when you’re caught in a forest with heavy, flat leaf litter, where you can barely see, and hear even less. My two cents.
Smell — i want vocabulary for smells. Not as in “smells like”, but actual words, all of which will have to be invented until we learn to translate from dog.