Look at my fine shells.
Oh, no, I got two brown snails.
I will take you back.


Discovered in the storage unit of my mother, Jessie Lee Dawson-Wilson (1936-2012), after her death, a yellowed and retaped sheet of grammar school paper dated in my pencil writing November 5, 1975 contains my earliest known poems--a group of five haiku for a class assignment. Unbeknownst to me when I was eleven, my mother wrote haiku, too, and may have helped me write mine, although my haiku owes more to Kobayashi Issa's (1763-1827) "particular sense of humor and a sensitivity for the small and helpless things of this world: insects, small animals, etc. (Gypsy's Haiku Definitions)," than to my mother's often Zen-like haiku.

I recall the incident behind my forty-two year old haiku. I awoke one morning and discovered shells on my lawn near the ivy. I thought that since they obviously were seashells from the sea, the ocean had washed them ashore on my lawn in the middle of the night. It didn't matter that I lived in the middle of the San Fernando Valley twenty miles from the Pacific. That's what I believed. Excited by this manna as if from Heaven, I gathered two shells. I planned to make earrings out of them for my mother. As I carried them and searched for string, the snails emerged from their shells. Disappointed, I returned the snails, although it would have been cool for my mother to wear live snails on her ears!

The final of a series of five haiku, I would not write another haiku for forty years. Looking back at my early effort, I criticize it for not having two interconnected lines and for having too much punctuation. Rather than rewrite it, I study the snails that emerge from the ivy at my condo today, nibble on the grass, and sometimes camp there overnight. I wonder why they didn't travel two feet to the ivy, but then I thought from the snail's perspective and a line came to me--"weary traveler."

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