Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai)

                  “Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes.”

                                                                               Akira Kurosawa

Haiku

Haiku is a smooth stone

from an ice-cold mountain stream

polished for eons.

Stain

There is strength in rain
falling warm on fertile plain:
in dark stain promise.

Ya-mori

Motion on the wall.
I turn and the gecko freezes.
Easily escapes.

Urge

Urge to classify.

Machine repeating machine.

Scissor fingers tire.

Trial Of Clay

Program is not key.
Tune spirit to fire raku
merging with green tea.

Dimension

Numbering dimension:
start with all unsaid within--
count out and backward.

Choice

All choices are false.
Cherry blossoms rise and fall.
Dancers wear cosmos.

E. A. Costa

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N.B.:Yamori (ヤモリ) “House Guardian”, the common Japanese name

for Gekko Japonicus or Schlegel's Gecko, named after Hermann Schlegel, 

author with Philipp Franz von Siebold of Fauna Japonica (1845-1850).

Raku (楽焼 raku-yaki) is a clay high in sand content specially fired and

 glazed and used in the making of tea-cups in the Japanese tea ceremony.

“Raku” means enjoyment and comes from “Jurakudai” a palace built by

 the daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi where the raku firing technique was first

 used. Stain, Yamori, Urge, Trial of Clay, Dimension and Choice are from

“If Love” (EAC, January, 2009). Haiku appears for the first time here. Kurosawa's

film is set in 1586 in the Japanese Warring States period during the dominance

of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who unified the country and brought the civil strife

to an end.