Hi everyone - Coifi here

There’s been some seriously good poetry recently. Reminds me of a project at Uni a couple of years ago exploring language and communication. It was good fun and still keeps me enthralled. I’ll tell you how it works and hope that some of you at least will try it.

You might call it “instant haiku” but that’s not really accurate. It’s not possible to use the haiku syllable system, and (being Western) I am hot happy with the requirements and restrictions of subject and allusion that go with traditional haiku. If you must find a way to describe them, I suggest “tercets” is as good a name as any.

What happens in this - you get a number (I have 36 in this set) of wooden ice lolly (popsicle) sticks or medical tongue depressors. On one side you write one open-ended line of poetry. I have my original set below - if you wanted to, you could print them out, cut them into singles and paste them on to the sticks. When you have done that, you bundle them up randomly and stick them in a pot or box. Without trying too hard, dip in and pick out three sticks, one at a time, and arrange them one above the other to make a three-line poem. I had the maths somewhere and I’ve lost it, but the business of picking three out of 36 will give thousands of possible results. I also remember calculating that I could produce a 150 page of poetry just with the 3-line variations of an original 36.

I have a little custom-built red velvet lectern for my sticks which live in a chinese pot on a special plinth. As I walk past, or for no particular reason, I just stop and pull three sticks to see what I get. I reckon the chances are I get a different poem every time and could go ten years before one repeats itself. One of my projects for 1999 is to make a specifically Druid set, although as you will see, there is a lot of Druidry in the one I have right now.

So, here goes! I have dipped into my pile of 36 sticks at random and just pulled them out one at a time in this order:-

hills singing in the sunshine

jewelled dragonflies

sound of distant thunder

smooth summer night

your breath on my neck

green and ancient stones

sharpness of broken stone

widgeon wheeling over water

in my hand, in your hand

green shade of beech and ash

snow in the mountains

afraid to turn the page

wind-whispering willows

laughter of children

sighs on the wind

softness, like starfall

looking through closed eyes

the smell of damp earth

jasmine and orange-blossom

the slow heartbeat

hiding in the reeds

an old man’s tears

falling from cloud to cloud

caught in a net of diamonds

Now as I said, this order is purely random and written like this doesn’t do much, but just to illustrate my point, here are the same 36 in exactly the same order, but presented as though I had drawn them out in threes and arranged them to make a poem. See what you think now.

hills singing in the sunshine
jewelled dragonflies
sound of distant thunder

smooth summer night
your breath on my neck
green and ancient stones

sharpness of broken stone
widgeon wheeling over water
in my hand, in your hand

green shade of beech and ash
snow in the mountains
afraid to turn the page

wind-whispering willows
laughter of children
sighs on the wind

softness, like starfall
looking through closed eyes
the smell of damp earth

jasmine and orange-blossom
the slow heartbeat
hiding in the reeds

an old man’s tears
alling from cloud to cloud
caught in a net of diamonds

Waes Hael!

Coifi

(Submitted by Donata)