By Diana Webb
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK
Sylvie is doing her English homework. She skims through ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by the poet John Keats and reads the final line aloud, ” ‘ Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?’ ” She reads it again and again. She loves the poet’s voice and writes a haiku:
echoes
just echoes
notes from a dream
Her mother tells her the writer from the Romantic movement stayed for a few days near their home, just over a hundred years ago. While there, he wrote in a letter that he could take part in the existence of a bird and asserted, ‘nothing startles me beyond the Moment’.
“I’ll never hear that bird for a moment “says her fourteen-year-old daughter. “Our teacher says it may soon be extinct. So perhaps the poet was psychic when he wrote those lines and especially this one, ‘No hungry generations tread thee down'”
She takes a deep breath and writes another haiku.
marching for greed
in dust underfoot
music of stardust