Cinnamon shoulders,
your waist is a reed.
You can't be snapped by the wind.
Hombros de canela,
tu cintura es un junco.
No puede romperte el viento. Me: I couldn't write poetry even if I tried.
Him: Oh yes you can.
I wrote a haiku about him, to prove him wrong. And then another. And another. He might deny his responsibility, but he was the one that made a poet of me, my own personal
Erato-and-Polymnia in male form.
English is easier for haikus because the words are shorter. I translated the first few just because my readers were Spanish. To me, the “real” version was the original one, the Spanish one just a crutch for readers. About six months and twenty poems later, I wrote my first translation that was not a gloss to the English haiku; by that time, I was already considering the English and the Spanish versions of each poem as a pair that should not be broken.
.