staggering from the peony - haiku in progress

Off to the Yorks Lancs Haiku meeting today. This time it is in the rural environs of Huddersfield, which happens to be warmer than Tod, slightly. The host bakes great quiches and the company will include some fine haiku writers. We are to bring 2 to 3 haiku on travel, of some one else's creation and of our own, to be discussed, as usual, anonymously. The company can be ruthless. They can of course also be wrong. But it's a rare and welcome privilege to attend the meeting nevertheless, and there will be some fine haiku there.

I have one on an owl. It's in my little notebook. dated 2/10/2016, and noted down shortly after the experience, when I was coming up the steep lane to my house one evening, and just past the lamp a bird slid noiselessly out of the hedge and flew low along the lane in front of me. It happened so quickly that the word 'owl' only came to me after it had gone. I knew very well I had owls. I often heard them at night but this was the first time I had seen one of them. Thrilled and moved I formulated the haiku, which after several mental drafts, mainly mulling over a preposition for the lane I believe - over? across? in front of me? I noted down

leaf-strewn lane
in lamplight
an owl flying [flies?] low

Part of the thrill was that I had found myself unusually quiet enough to receive this haiku moment - often I am too full of the then and the soon-to-come to stay that long in the now.

I like it and you could say it refers to travel, for the owl at least.

However, having alighted on a Basho offering to take as well last night (I think the intention is to read through haiku books or to rifle your haiku memory but I cheated and googled Basho and 'travel' - ah well, it still took some finding)

A bee
staggers
from the peony

mine now seems far too wordy. I've been pondering the difference overnight. Basho's hinges for me round the word 'staggers' with its connotations of drunkenness and the zig zag of bee flight, although this one can hardly fly I think, as well as the precision of 'peony', and as I write this now I wonder if the way a peony is shaped will make a bee come out of it clumsily too. [[[[[]]]]]] the symbols mark my quick dip into google land again and yes the peony petals in the images I found are very closely leafed together. I can quite imagine a bee going far in and then being disoriented on coming out, or even blinded by the sun, possibly having to squeeze past the petals too.

So what can I ditch from mine?

The orange tinge of the lamplight seems important to my memory, and the leaves are needed to suggest the season, and the lane because the owl was flying along right in front of me - as if we shared the walk for a moment.

lamp lit
an owl
flying low

no, that misses out the sense of the owl in front of me, which was so magical, but I like the addition of 'low' - another part of that magic. Does it matter so much that the light was orange?

along the leaf-strewn lane
an owl
flying low

yes gets in the season and lots of 'l's - 'along' is also more accurate than 'over', which was another preposition I had hovered above. But the word order is a bit clumsy and so very unlike that smooth silent swift glide of the owl. I was intending to put here (and now will) this next draft:

flying low
along the leaf-strewn lane
an owl

but my commentary has inspired a change before I even get there. I want not 'flying' but a word that like 'staggers' carries much with it - in this case flight, silence, smoothness, and a specific rendering of the bird's movement, while retaining an 'l' sound too:

gliding low
along the leaf-strewn lane
an owl

There! I have it! But I take one last look back at the first version and am once more undecided, not sure which to take !!! Maybe the journey will decide me.

The second haiku I can offer is a hawthorn buzzard moment - from around the same time as the owl. Another first bird experience - seeing and identifying the buzzard and then, just when it has gone out of sight, hearing the confirming sound of its call. I was walking down another lane, this time in Herefordshire, towards the Vipassana meditation centre. Here are the versions in my little book, dated 17/10/2016:

over the flowering hawthorn
the [flown] flying buzzard's 'mew'

over the flowering hawthorn
the soaring/flying buzzard's
mew

flowers hang over
the hawthorn hedge -
the mew of a buzzard

the last is most accurate since it wasn't the hawthorn hedge itself that was flowering - not in the autumn - but another kind of flower hanging over it. However, I know the group will ask me to name the flower and even google can't help on this.

I come up with

flowers heap
over the hawthorn hedge
the mew of a buzzard

which gives a hinged line in the middle but is less accurate in that there weren't as many flowers as a 'heap' would suggest.

How about

flowers hang
over the hawthorn hedge
the mew of a buzzard

?

Yes. And maybe the haiku group can help with the flower.

Just to finish off, I check the Basho poem online again. I've remembered the preposition wrong. Robert Hass, who translated it, has managed more precision than that, and also cut the lines differently - a clearer more definite picture than my misremembered one. How delicate this work is!

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.