What’s Next With Facebook Deleting This Pages Poetry?: A Letter to the & Haiku Community.

Dear Sisters and Brothers, Let us first start with Basho, the creator the poetic form we still call haiku. “Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.” Basho, writing about the razor’s edge of poetry in his piece, Learn From The Pine. Poetry isn’t what Facebook was built for, so thank you for all your support through the years. It is truly humbling to have a reflective community on a platform that is built against such an act of autonomy. Moving forward, haibun (prose with haiku) will still be written, edited, and produced for Saturdays, 8.35am, EST. There will be no links provided in the near future. This is in hopes that this will keep Facebook at bay. If Facebook lets the posts stay posted, enjoy! If not, please check out www.twitter.com/andhaiku. The link there has all of the haiku archived. For a growing archive of haibun, the link in the profile of www.twitter.com/edwardsmarc can help you. But, those instructions, that part of the letter is to address yesterday, and the past forced into a small portion of tomorrows. But for most of the tomorrows and especially for today, let me use three more Basho quotes to celebrate you and why this page must continue. These quotes point to how I understand you—you the faithful to this page, but more importantly, you the faithful to what is outside the drama of each of our own worlds—and it this understanding of you as to why I publish to each week. 1. “If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as a renga verse. Haiku, however, needs more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy.” 2. “When we observe calmly, we discover that all things have their fulfillment.” 3. “Learn about the pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.” In closing out who you are in the movements of my metaphorical pen, I see in each of you a sacred authenticity, and my words flow out to those who move in that as their center, not the judgements of others. With that, remember in your depths that it isn’t mundane when the sacred comes alive to just you as a witness, or maybe me, or anyone of us as an individual. And so, it is to you I remain as your humbled oracle. Thank you, Marc Edwards Founder and Current Weekly Poet


Originally published on July 24, 2019: