The Poetry of Patrick Blanche

The Magazine of The World Haiku Club
Vol. 1, Issue 2:  August  2001

Haiku Treasure Trove – Patrick Blanche (FR)

We offer a new feature called “Haiku Treasure Trove”. Here we will introduce those haiku and related poems which are excellent but have not seen the light of day.

This lack of recognition can be caused by various circumstances. The most obvious cause is that they are written by beginners, the uninitiated or children. More often than not, they create brilliant haiku, uncontaminated by rules, guidelines and knowledge.

Another cause is that they are poems which do not go along with the fashion of the day or a dominant trend, thereby with haiku editors. Also, innovative or experimental poems have, by their very nature, less chance to be published. Then, there are poems by those who write them for their own consumption and seldom share them except for their close friends. These include people who write poems only in a specific (and sometimes specialised) field such as railways, or Zen, or sports.

One more important source worth mentioning is those non-haiku poets (I decline to use the phrase “the mainstream poets”) who write what they call haiku poems from time to time, which are normally rejected by the haiku camp. We wish to break this silly barrier and try and communicate with them.

In this issue, we have Patrick Blanche who lives in our midst but belongs to earlier centuries rather than 20th or 21st; to the world of Issa and Santoka rather than to the commercially and technologically orientated ultramodern world; to the spiritual sphere rather than to the environment dominated by materialism. There are many who pretend, or wish to belong to such things, but Blanche actually does. He seeks no fame, no material wealth, no speed, no efficiency, no victory, no one-upmanship, no position, basically nothing.

I therefore would not do the introduction of him or print his bio, except to say that he was born in 1950 somewhere in France and now lives somewhere in France, and that he is a poet and an artist. He is loved and respected by those who know him. His verses speak for themselves.

The following selection is taken from Patrick Blanche’s hand-made anthology, The Toad’s Song, a collection of his poems translated from French into English by his closest friends with love and care.

SPRING

Starting spring
A line of cyclists
rides across Sunday

to Makoto KemmokuMimosa flowers springtime is already here We are getting old

First butterfly just time to catch the shadow of its passing wings

Enjoying the silence between two air-raids Cherry harvest

Widening circles The frog has vanished into the pond’s depth

Perfect liberty Dandelion in the wind explodes into seed

The great nettles too
seem to be so excited
Scent of spring time

So light the willow Today even the least word would weigh too heavy

Lost in town a butterfly dies caught in tar

He mows his lawn beheading a thousand suns Dandelions’ end

SUMMER

Summer dusk The toad’s song answers the cicada’s screech

Honeysuckle in bloom Slugs are going their way and sometimes they cross

Rare moments of calm
when the fridge is silent
you can hear the wind

Perfect silence even the ants are resting Midday in Provence

Bird house day by day became a house of spiders

Grasshopper in the gutter left to the feasting ants End of summer

AUTUMN

And again listening to the autumn light Unable to say a thing

to Raju Chhatry

Time is suspended …
before the candid whiteness
of the morning glory

Waking from sleep
eyes on the chrysanthemum
So simple is life

White morning glory trumpeting its whiteness to who will hear it

Attached to brambles traces of dew glitter A breath of light

Birds by the hundreds A distant woodpecker’s beak hammering dawn

A riot of ivy Not moving, the traveller listens to the blackbird

Alone at the hermitage with wood to last the winter And a chrysanthemum

The master is gone but the banana leaves still rustle in the breeze

WINTER

First snowfall on the chrysanthemum White touching white

And now the season of endless nights returned Faded chrysanthemum

Simple winter event Sleeping on old cardboard a vagabond: dead

Just what it needs some snow in order to bow white chrysanthemum

Raindrops one by one fall from the washing-line There are no more leaves

A dull drone of
an airplane weighs on the night
December settling in

To end as hermit in frost-covered mountains where crows are calling

Gluing together broke n pieces of their lives Couple in winter

Growing older a hand on my wife’s bare flesh…..Winter night

Winter…..A ladder that leads nowhere against a dead tree

to Laura Verhulst

Clouds drifting along
endless roads of winter
A lone vagabond

Nothing much to give
only this passing moment
Winter stillness

A departing year The white chrysanthemum has changed colour

NEW YEAR

New year’s Day……..A dog left alone outside the house crying in the snow

Soaking salted cod for the New Year dinner: a smell of the ocean!

ALL SEASONS, OR MUKI (NO SEASON)

The dog, left alone, after his master’s suicide rummaging the trash

That bunch of flowers flattened on the main street who was it for?

The magpie perched
at the top of the cypress
sways with it

A real grain’s feast! These little hands of the rats so alike ours

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ON THE HAIKU PATH

“The age-old calm of the days that simply mind the rules set by the four seasons”  – Pierre Mac Orlan -

Autumn light enters the kitchen where the fire is purring. An ordinary existence. Yet the banality of everyday life makes the miracle of being recur at each instant.

Humble tasks: chopping wood, lighting the fire, pouring water on the coffee-grounds. To hear the kettle simmering or the hum of the fire as it suddenly flares up. To lift one’s eyes to the sky and thank creation, once again.

Peace, tranquillity, even joy, are quite near. To learn each day anew the humility of acceptance and thus continue to wonder at the world, even if man sullies it with his over-flowing ideas.

Joy is our natural state; we must be on guard against our worst enemy: our own mind and its mixed-up contradictions.

The beauty of existence glows most intensely when the quest is over.

What a miracle, the golden hue of this autumn leaf!

Nature, our innermost being, will forever bear with us.

To walk in the hills or in public gardens surrounded by fraternal trees: they have so much to give to the unassuming.

To marvel at one’s own breath. Ah! To simply breathe …

The spirit of Nature encompasses everything – even the smallest creature reflects its light.

Nothing is mysterious within this spirit, nothing is hidden or difficult to grasp. It is the evidence of being.

In these troubled times when men huddle in cities, times of conceit and haste, we human beings in a declining civilization are very proud to have sent our pretentious machines to the moon, our sister, and flatter ourselves that we can span the earth in a few seconds, thanks to our modern inventions. Perhaps we should instead remain quietly seated, doing nothing at all, and contemplate the moon, listening to the rustle of the wind in the bamboo or the poplars, attentive to the leap of the frog into the old pond or simply be happy to hear the cuckoo singing in the spring.

Extraordinary things are hidden in the most ordinary.

To be able to wonder at banality, what a gift!

……………“Near a furrow,
…………………by a rain-puddle,
…………………………A toad was looking at the sky”

wrote Victor Hugo.
(Provence, November 1998)