re:Virals 546

“More difficult than making your own verses interesting is understanding those of others…” ―Shinkei (1406 –1475). Citing this, Onitsura (1661 – 1738) wrote: “…this should be a way in which a person is completely given over to training.”

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Melissa. This week’s poem, chosen by Jonathan Epstein was:

puppet theater
someone calls me by
my childhood nickname
—Cezar Ciobica
 cattails 252, October 2025

Introducing this poem, Jonathan Epstein writes:

This one dazzled me; in fact, still leaves me at a loss for words.

Whether an old friend in the puppet theater recognizes the narrator or one of the puppets calls out “my childhood nickname” doesn’t matter. Something magical and exalting happens to the “me” in this poem, as it does to me the reader. Puppetry, has always had that effect on me — something to do with how, in the silence of watching a slow, subtle movement of a puppet’s arm with a lift of its head and a fluttering of eyelashes has the power to still the mind and create a sense of intense aliveness.

Host comment Melissa:

These lines by Cezar refer to the importance of memory, particularly childhood memories. When I read this verse I imagine a puppet show, and as the curtain rises being immediately transported back to childhood. Is this a common occurrence? When it comes to childhood recollections I have a conch shell that my grandparents brought back for me from their travels, as I longed to hear the sea. When I put this to my ear it is like time folds back or compresses back on itself and I see my grandparents and hear their voices, just as if it were yesterday, rather than decades ago.

Recently I heard the theme tune to the Pink Panther show, Official Pink Panther – You Tube which I would watch every Saturday teatime as a child. I loved that cartoon character, and as soon as I heard the opening bars, I was transported – so many happy memories came flooding back of being at home with my parents, laid on my tummy in front of the tv, being told that I would get ‘square eyes’. For me that is the power of this haiku.

However, what has been niggling at me this week is whether it is a good thing or not to be called by your childhood nickname? Children can be cruel and tease and bully one another. I remember being bullied at school and how unhappy that made me feel, and so I wonder what you think? Are we all looking back at our childhoods through rose-tinted spectacles?

Dan Campbell:

You never forget your childhood nickname. For Cezar, what a great name, it may have been Cezaroo—a name invented on a dusty playground for a kid who could hop from one idea to another faster than a kangaroo. The name followed him everywhere: shouted across soccer fields, scribbled on notebooks, shouted by friends in the hallway at school.

At first he probably hated it. Cezaroo sounded ridiculous, cartoonish, impossible to take seriously. Yet the nickname carried something affectionate inside its silliness. It meant he was memorable.

Years passed. Cezar grew older, moved away, acquired titles—analyst, consultant, poet. But one day, at a puppet show, someone from the old neighborhood called out, “Hey, Cezaroo!”

And suddenly the years collapsed like folding chairs after a parade. In that moment he was ten again, running and laughing, hopping through the wild freedom of boyhood.

Urszula Marciniak:

We have relatives, some of us have family through marriage. But there’s something special about the bonds that form at school. A nickname, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, guides us through life with greater force than we could have imagined.

Years pass, we take our children to a play. We hear our old nickname, and… a wave of emotions floods us. So diverse that we struggle to name them. A window of memory opens before us, reminding us of things long forgotten. We are that child again, somewhat lost in the big world, who has found a kindred spirit. Perhaps we haven’t aged so much if someone recognises us. We frantically search for the name or nickname of the person who spoke to us. To no avail. We smile and say, “Hi, how are you?”

Radhamani Sarma:

Immense thanks for this week’s senryu by Cezar Ciobica concentrating on puppet theater. A very interesting and thought-provoking read. Having been born in this cruel world, we are all plying the roll of spectators or actors, the stage being the drama of human life. Day in day out it all depends upon moods, temper, anger etc; the outcome being success, or failure, fight or separation.

What we are seeing here is a puppet theater, the vital question arises: what is puppet theater? True to the adage, : “child is father of man” the puppet theater showcases improvised drama for young mostly, where imagination plays its own vital role adding to the satisfaction of the spectators. In the second line, the person articulates a recollection, vague and unidentified.

The voice echoing from the puppet theater may be addressed to a general audience, but the haiku writer/speaker here imagines hearing his childhood nickname; it is a pleasant situation, a merry voice. In that ” someone” so much is compressed. I recall my grandmother calling her grandchildren, by a nickname for example,”bubbulu kutty,” a fond, affectionate term.

Finally the senryu captures the delicacy in the use of nickname, childhood memory, the triangle where the three including laughter veer around.

Sudha Devi Nayak:

A throwback to the storied joys of childhood, what can compare with the exhilaration a child feels when she sees puppets springing to action?. Inanimate figures become animated on a white canvas through the unseen hands of puppeteers – master creators and manipulators of magic. The puppets bob, dance and twirl in gay abandon and kings and queens, clowns and courtiers, beautiful princesses and wicked witches play their parts to perfection. The euphoria of it all!

The poet in this haiku must have been to a puppet show with their kids in tow and heard his nickname in the crowd. Memories ring bells,transports of nostalgia, as he sees a close friend from the old days and we can imagine the wave of emotions that sweep them back to times that were.

Words bubble forth and they reclaim and relive their childhood in sun spangled afternoons,the boisterous picnics, the games played in the courtyard, the inane jokes they cracked, the silly secrets they promised to keep forever. There were shared tears too over broken toys and undeserved reprimands of grown ups. Then again the school boy pranks, the bugbear of examinations, the liberation on the last day of school and the freedom of vacations. Where did they all vanish?

Some Master puppeteer lured them into the humdrum of existence and it’s rude realities.  It just required a puppet show to turn them into children for a brief while. The past was a haloed existence, no strings attached, where every day the same, predictable with anticipated joys and tears and yet different, luminous with the delight of discovery in every bush and tree, the notes of the birdsong and the quiet certainty that every caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly.

David Cox:

The marvels like a puppet theatre seem to have the endless potential to engage children and adults. Not too many years ago I found myself with a friend at the popular puppet theatre in Tbilisi, which, while popular with tourists, unsurprisingly had a huge audience of local primary school children.

The poem appears to evoke the strong sense of nostalgia, perhaps the craving for something long ago. Like a puppet show. This is not just because the show itself is a spectacle but also because it reminds us of the epoch of our younger self where everything was new, exciting and almost every stimulus felt fresh and not dashed by the adult worlds of formulaic routine and cynicism. But perhaps all is not lost, if we can be ‘returned to our childhood’ by the quickest trigger, like the calling of a “childhood nickname”, our child selves were within us all along. On a separate but related point, I have recently eschewed my own nickname which is only used by my family as new members of my extended family started using it and it made me feel as if I was a child again. The effect, however, was to make me feel infantilized as opposed to evoking a sense of childlike wonder!

Perhaps a take-away from the poem is that we simply just need to keep our connection to the child that exists within us that guides and drives the infinite world of our creative imagination where anything is possible, in spite of the pressures of the adult world that act as our puppet master.

Ashoka Weerakkody:

Cezar Ciobica has come out with an explosive revelation – which many of us would instantly grasp in our secret desires that make us yearn for a ‘refill’ of time, Time that was, and gone for ever! I would call it, in my case, the ‘secret kingdom:’ that has been slowly but surely building up as the years passed me by… leaving me drenched in solitude unknown to everyone else near and dear.

The mind laments the irrevocable loss of precious days, weeks and months although within our cells (‘selves’ may be a cladding word) we couldn’t do anything to thriftily manage the slow dripping of this ‘liveable’ time. We dream within our cells knowingly or otherwise, we are passing away. The sad part is that we never know till one has passed away that he has been passing away all the while. The ‘secret kingdom’ around each and every one of us goes on, getting built-up by itself. Better if we knew but it doesn’t manifest in time, never, until it’s late. May be the term ‘late’ applies more often to those who are gone for good because it’s the time we lose out of, unable to recap in advance.  Then, the “puppet theatre” here becomes the secret world for me, at least. And it’s a place where the lifeless can come to life and move, floating about, gyrate and dance making the onlookers laugh and cheer, having a brief but an unforgettably happy time gathered as a cohesive little group sharing the magic of puppet for once in a while. It’s rather like a merry-go-round ride sitting on the back of a wooden horse at a carnival, surroundings wrapped in pappara-band music blasting out into the surroundings the joy that races through time running around a static axis!

“someone calls me…” the haiku goes on, and yes, the sudden disruption to the thus far gathered-up privacy watching the jokers and clowns and kings, falls away in an instant. And that phrase within the haiku doesn’t end there, for the poet adds another word “by” which should have fallen into the last line and made the meaning too obvious, direct and plain for everyone. But, this is haiku in the more exclusive domain it suggests to me. Perhaps the author wanted to store away a word in the upper rack for want of space in the bottom or the haiku was written, signed, sealed and delivered in a hurry!

The last line, “my childhood nickname” says as much, no more, no less , and we realise, the happy or otherwise, reunion which makes the rarely attended puppet theatre a turning point in their lives. A fondly welcome little verse and we are just short of a world cruise… in the same scale their puppets and our ‘secret kingdoms’ are.

Sitarama Seshu Maringanti:

The haiku of Cezar Ciobica brings before our eyes a universal rural experience of a bygone era. The Puppet Theatre is one such and consisted of dolls made of soft wood and painted in gay and attractive colours. These colourful dolls or puppets were attached to strings or wires. A few artists manipulated the strings artfully over a well-lighted white curtain and created an illusion of living dolls. Depending upon the theme selected for the evening, the story tellers, hiding behind the curtain, set a son et lumiere with the dancing dolls to the great enjoyment of the spectators. The haiku is set in the present tense. Possibly to illustrate that life is a continuum and art forms like Puppet shows have an element of permanence. Though the theatre has undergone a change of technique over time, there are many amongst us who have been part of the milieu in the past who watched the show then in the past as they do now. Thus an element of poignancy erupts when, unknown to the haikuist, someone in the theatre calls him with his childhood nickname. But ‘who among the multitude ?’ is the question that surprises the poet. A mystery.

Uma Padmanabhan — loosening the strings:

The opening line, “Puppet theatre,” suggests artifice — a stage where figures are controlled by unseen strings. It evokes the idea that life itself can feel scripted, roles assigned, movements guided by forces beyond us.

Then comes the quiet interruption: “Someone calls me by / my childhood name.” In that single moment, the speaker is pulled out of the spectacle and back into the intimacy of the past. A childhood name carries warmth, familiarity, and a version of the self untouched by time’s later layers.

The juxtaposition is striking. While the puppets move mechanically on stage, the call of the childhood name awakens something deeply human — memory, identity, and vulnerability. It reminds us that beneath the roles we play as adults, the child-self still exists, waiting to be recognised.

The haiku’s power lies in this sudden emotional shift: from the public performance of life to a private recognition of who we once were. The moment is small, almost incidental, yet it loosens the strings of the present and lets the past gently in.

Cezar Ciobica:

I am honored to have a poem commented on this site, which is a benchmark for haiku writers around the world.

The poem chosen by Jonathan has the following story. One day, I was in a fifth-grade classroom teaching the children personification. It was a sunny day, and a student at the last desk was playing with her hands, casting all kinds of shadows on the wall to her right. She was having a great time. Thus, for a few seconds I had the impression that someone from my childhood was calling me by a nickname hidden in a corner of my memory.

Later, after this moment of revelation, I wrote the first form of this poem, obviously in my native language. I thought about what words I should choose so that the poem would not lose its freshness, surprise, challenge as a whole.

Initially, instead of someone it was a friend, mom, dad, but I gave up and chose an indefinite pronoun to increase the mystery. Honestly, now I regret that instead of childhood name I didn’t put nickname, because I wanted to subtly highlight the idea of bullying by using mean words…

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Uma has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, to a maximum of 500 words (succinctness will be valued); academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic.  As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems.

Poem for commentary:

     
scent of summer
filling his gnarled hands
last tomatoes
—Annie Wilson
 Haiku Foundation Haiku Dialogue
 December 10, 2025

Footnote:

Cezar Ciobîcă works în Botoșani, Romania, as teacher and writer. His haiku have appeared in several journals and anthologies. He coordinates the Sakura Haiku Club in his hometown, proposes themes for The Monthly Romanian Kukai, and takes part in the organizing team of the International Haiku Contest Sharpening the Green Pencil. Over time, he has won several awards in haiku competitions organized in his country or abroad. He is also the recipient of the Touchstone Prize for Individual Poetry in 2024, for the haiku: window at the hospice / mother counts / shades of green.

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