Haiku

Haiku
by Ralph Earle

dark lake of sky
nets of naked branches
fish for invisible day

Comment: At one point I pared the central image to “naked nets fish for day.” This struck a friend as “sound for sound’s sake” and a certain semantic coyness. I was puzzled until I recognized that if the branches are not explicitly mentioned, readers have no idea of the nets’ physical reality. While I was seeing nets of branches, my friend was simply hearing a fanciful piscine metaphor. In this case the briefest expression of the image is not the best.

Bio: Ralph Earle’s poems have been published in The Sun, Carolina Quarterly, Sufi Magazine, Kakalak, Cardinal, Main Street Rag, The Independent, Independence Boulevard, Hampden-Sydney Review, Pembroke Review, Davidson Miscellany, East West Journal, Sandpaper, The Guide, Gravida, Public Occurrence, and Back Roads. He lives and works in Chatham County, North Carolina, south of Chapel Hill.