“Just enough snow to make you look carefully at familiar streets”: the Haiku of Richard Wright

ZP_El Círculo de Amigos…bajo la nieve

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Just enough snow

To make you look carefully

At familiar streets.

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On winter mornings

The candle shows faint markings

Of the teeth of rats.

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In the falling snow

A laughing boy holds out his palms

Until they are white.

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The snowball I threw

Was caught in a net of flakes

And wafted away.

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A freezing morning:

I left a bit of my skin

On the broomstick handle.

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The Christmas season:

A whore is painting her lips

Larger than they are.

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Standing patiently

The horse grants the snowflakes

A home on his back.

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In the falling snow

the thick wool of the sheep

gives off a faint vapour.

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Entering my town

In a fall of heavy snow

I feel a stranger.

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In this rented room

One more winter stands outside

My dirty windowpane.

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The call of a bird

sends a solid cake of snow

sliding off the roof.

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I slept so long and sound,

but I did not know why until

I saw the snow outside.

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The smell of sunny snow

is swelling the icy air –

the world grows bigger.

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The cold is so sharp

that the shadow of the house

bites into the snow.

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What do they tell you

each night, O winter moon,

before they roll you out?

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Burning out its time

And timing its own burning,

One lovely candle.

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Richard Nathaniel Wright (born Roxie, Mississippi,1908, died Paris, 1960) was a rigorous Black-American short-story writer, novelist, essayist, and lecturer. He joined the Communist Party USA in 1933 and was Harlem editor for the newspaper “Daily Worker”.  Intensely racial themes were pervasive in his work and famous books such as Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) were sometimes criticized for their portrayal of violence – yet, as the 1960s’ voices of Black Power would phrase it – a generation later – he was just “telling it like it is.”

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Wright discovered Haiku around 1958 and began to write obsessively in this Japanese form using what was becoming the standard “shape” in English:  5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, in three separate lines, and with the final line adding an element of surprise – delicate or otherwise.  One of Haiku’s objectives is, to paraphrase Matsuo Bashō, a 17^th-century Japanese poet:  In a haiku poem, if you reveal 70 to 80 percent of the subject – that’s good – but if you show only 50 to 60 percent, then the reader or listener will never tire of that particular poem.

What do you think – does Wright succeed?

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The 4 Seasons are themes in Haiku;  here we have presented a palmful of Wright’s Winter haiku. Wright was frequently bedridden during the last year of his life and his daughter Julia has said that her father’s haiku were “self-developed antidotes against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath.”  She also added:  her father was striving “to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness.”

We are grateful to poet Ty Hadman for these quotations from Wright’s daughter, Julia.

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The above haiku were selected from the volume  Richard Wright:  Haiku, This Other World, published posthumously, in 1998, after a collection of several thousand Haiku composed by Wright was ‘ found ‘ in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.

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