Recently I dreamed that I was alone in a
suburban neighborhood. Wide green lawns surrounded big white houses, but the
trees on these lawns were bare and wintry-looking. Bright sun gleamed in a
clear blue sky, and the air was crisp and breezeless. All of the natural
elements in this place—the green grass, the bald trees, even the big blue
sky—had a manicured banality about them, and the atmosphere of the neighborhood
was permeated by the mood of a desert.
Gazing above the roofs of the houses into the
blank blue sky, I heard in my head the chorus of “In God’s Country” by U2. I
don’t think I’ve heard this song in more than twenty years, but I remember that
when I did hear it, I was intrigued by the melancholy mood it made, especially
during the refrain
Sleep comes like a drug
In God’s country.
I began having envious, self-pitying thoughts
along the lines of “Man what a gift to write a song so engaging about something
so terrible....Why don’t I write songs like that....” et cetera. Then, in
the midst of my brooding, a huge flock of birds suddenly appeared in the sky
and dove down toward the ground. Wow, I thought, this is amazing! This is what
you should concentrate on instead of all that other crap!
The birds landed on a lawn in front of one of
the big houses and strutted around squalling on the green grass. For the first
time I noticed three small children, the oldest of whom may have been seven
years old at most, who had been playing on the lawn where the birds had just
landed. They were squalling with excitement at the sudden presence of all these
squalling birds.
I too was filled with excitement, and beholding
these children in their knit caps and winter coats romping and shouting with
all these rowdy indescribable birds, I felt compelled to compose a haiku in an
attempt to honor this extraordinary ordinary moment.
In my mind I fitted words to the scene that I
was steeped in, letting the pulse of the mood I was feeling guide my choices,
so that it felt like I was tracing the poem, rather than contriving it. I
remember feeling pleased at how easily the words that occurred to me were
nestling into the 5-7-5 syllabic scheme of the haiku form. Then I woke up. And
wrote down what I remembered.
A cloud of birds lands
on the lawn and squalls with all
the squalling children
.
