An exchange of commentary from myself & Nicholas Klacsanzky on "Up the Mtn #120". On the Google + "Poets" Community.

sunlight

wet ferns - leaves shimmering

hallelujah

divine incarnations

everywhere      nature's divinity

Nicholas:

I feel this could be a lot simpler. "shimmering" implies there is sunlight and the last two lines are implied by the third line. 

It could be:

wet ferns

and leaves shimmer

hallelujah

We could make "shimmering" to be "shimmer" in order for it to be more immeditate as well. 

My response:

Yes I see ur point Nicholas. Your edits would make this tanka a simpler, and briefer haiku. Although I had a lot more I was trying to communicate in this tanka. Shimmering suggests more of a present tense & implies a little more movement in the leaves than shimmer. Also "hallelujah" connotes christian spirituality is present in nature "every where", which is also momentarily binds the divinity within Christianity with the divinity of Taoism, Shinto, & the Buddhist History of Nature present in Japanese Haiku & Tanka. Also "divine incarnations" implies not just the ferns but all in nature and of the images everywhere in this haiga and those we might conjure up in our heads while reading this poem. In the rocks, dirt, trees, shimmering waters on the fern leaves, the air, etc.  These divine incarnations everywhere and especially in nature where adam & eve were banished to are not what we in the west usually associate to be occurring in nature. Nature is usually associated with being exclusively being present for the Christian "Man" to bend to his will as a resource to be molded rather than being something that is as divine in as of itself just as Christ or God, or Buddha might be. Yet being redundant I felt I could better bind these images together in the readers eye, all of which is harder to do in a haiku. I was trying to bind the plethora of religious beliefs into a unified spiritual moment. akin to a spiritual koan. 

I wrote it for three Christian, Buddhist, and Shinto (church, temple, shrine) organizations in Sapporo, Japan. It was supposed to be a poem that speaks to all in a unifying way during a community celebration. 

Nicholas:

I did not get the conotation of being related to all religions. Maybe you could have other religious exclamations besides the Christian one.

My response:

Well I did refer to the some of the Dharmic Religions (Buddhist, Taoist, & Shinto) when I spoke of nature being divinity. But as you suggested I will play with doing some in haiku as well.