True Haikus of Malakal

Episcopal cathedral entrance on a rainy day

Japanese haiku poems are more or less bound to three guidelines. In addition to a vague impression that the poem must somehow express the Japanese Spirit, it will have seventeen syllables—five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third—and it will allude to a season. With the exception of Okinawa, which doesn’t have much of a winter, Japan is famous for, and famously obsessed with its four seasons. In the spring when cherry blossoms come out, the nightly news shows a map of how far north they have started to bloom. Summer is an occasion for the reinvention of the entire Japanese diet. Fall foliage viewers make even the most intense New England-bound tourists look like amateurs. 

In South Sudan, the seasons are fewer by half—rainy, dry—but equally important to the life of the nation.  I offer this haiku as a meditation on the notoriously muddy rainy season in Malakal and the Spirit of South Sudan.

Six foot two student

Rolled-up trousers, pressed white shirt
Nods; “You come teach us.”

Episcopal compound view from the outhouse.
Left: Secondary school (with cathedral wall behind);
Right: Primary school;
Center: Goats

- John