Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Gunshot Haiku

There are literally two Americas. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

a flurry of white ...
a black man shot in the back
as he runs


Note: "There are literally two Americas," the joshi ("prefatory note" functioning as a poetic device), is taken from Dr. King's speech  made at Stanford University in 1967, a year before his assassination.