triveni spotlight A FEATURE EVERY ALTERNATE DAY! hosts: Vidya Shankar and Teji Sethi GUEST EDITOR: Baisali Chatterjee Dutt 1 Aug 2024
alone in bed
the tilt of a portrait
I never noticed
— Teji Sethi
haikuKATHA issue 14
One of the things I love about haiku is that it often leaves itself open to interpretation. In certain cases, I think the word ‘interpretation’ can even be exchanged with ‘imagination.’
As someone whose imagination is always running on a tankful of coffee, certain ku read like a scene from a movie making me wonder what happened before, what happened after, what exactly triggered this ku… Where was the poet when this happened? What happened or what did they experience to make them write this ku? Who made them feel this way and why?
I find layers, I read between the lines, I imagine the situation and sometimes, I end up with a movie in my head. A bigger picture. One that goes beyond the three lines before us.
All the ku I’ve chosen for this month’s Spotlight series have set off endless wonderings and
ponderings in my mind…and I happily indulged them all.
— Baisali Chatterjee Dutt
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Thank you for being our next guest editor, Baisali. We look forward to "the endless wonderings and ponderings" all through this month.
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It's amazing what one sees in the solitude. That's one thing I like about plants in our home. They change begging for you to look again.
Karen
There's something mysterious about this ku, leaving the reader to ponder so many interpretations.
There are quite a few reasons one might find themselves alone in bed (besides the obvious, of course)...maybe convalescence from an illness, maybe after a fight with one's partner, or alone in a hotel on a business trip, or just because family is away and you have the whole house AND bed all to yourself. The desire to idle away an hour or two or more, opens the door to many a mind-engaging activity such as time travel, walks down memory lane, conversations with oneself, re-enactments of recent events, could-have-beens-should-have-beens, to name but a few. And suddenly, in that state of reverie, a hither-to unnoticed detail catches one's eye... A happy bed-hugger myself, I have spent many an hour alone in…