dragonflies

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sunset -
a thousand dragonfly wings
over the paddies

They seem to have come out all at once !
The reflection of the late sunshine on all these wings is just fascinating !





dragonfly wings -
whispering the words of
an old love song







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Dragonfly (tombo, tonbo) Japan KIGO




an argument :

... not to use the numeral 'thousand', that would be untrue because you couldn't have counted them?!!

Well

We were sitting on the terrasse when the dragonflies suddenly showed up below us in the rice fields.

My husband said: "There must be a thousand!", So I added (an old joke of us):
"Why not count the wings and divide the number by four?"


Comments of some friends at HH.

Easy to visualize, Gabi, but I agree with xxx san on this one. (Only because I've received similar comments! )
You might want to find another way of showing the number, rather than counting them. Then again, this may simply be a haiku for your own 'memory bank' and be perfectly fine for the purpose!

.....

Love the image, Gabi san!
I did a bit of research...found a few cases where "a thousand" is used...perhaps it's accepted as a "round number"?

2 on this page: (in the "notebook" section)
http://www.asahi.com/english/haiku/070319.html


2nd place poem:
http://sakura.ua.edu/haiku_contest_winners_1998.htm

An interesting topic!

.....

i took the thousand to be the kind of exaggeration one uses in the moment ... wonder, disbelief, tautology ... and so on ...

i tend to use a million ...

i hesitated at the wings ... i thought to myself why not dragonflies ... why dragonfly wings ... but ... it does work !

.....

"Like" one-thousand.. . . . . . . . . . . .

works for me. BTW, english is a non-literal language sometimes, and also sometimes breaks its own "rules". re:

" haiku rules! "

versus

" haiku-rules"

.....

Hi Gabi,
I like both versions very much...the 'thousand' and the 'old love song'..lovely.

P.S. Hate to make you jealous, but I had no mosquitos this year up on the 6th floor in the city!

.....

Yes! Yes! Yes! What sparkling silences you tell !!

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Whether or not to use a thousand, a million or just say many, a lot ...
I prefer to use the numbers, a million stars in the sky ... even if it is quite a cliche. Something you can not count, well, you just can not count.

There is no special guideline in Japanese for this type of vocabulary use, as far as I am aware of.

We also have Ten thousand (man, ban 万) in Asia, an expression dating back to the Chinese T'ang Dynasty. It signifies a long time, usually eternity.
BANZAI 万歳, ten thousand years, is a common cheer　in Japan.

GABI

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Here are some more of my Dragonfly Haiku :
Vaughn Seward's haikuworkshop:
The Dragonfly Haiku Series


At www.wonderhaikuworlds.com


Read my Haiku Archives 2007


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