Scotland Yard deals with a terrorist:
At Stockwell Station, armed officers opened fire on the suspect after he hurdled a ticket barrier and raced along a platform.
Police screamed at passengers to evacuate and are thought to have shot the suspect as he stumbled on to a train.
My haiku for the occasion:
[Redacted out of respect for the dead man’s innocence.]
Here’s an eyewitness account from the Grauniad:
“An Asian guy ran on to the train. As he ran, he was hotly pursued by what I knew to be three plain-clothes police officers.
“He tripped and was also pushed to the floor and one of the officers shot him five times.
“One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand. They held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He’s dead, five shots, he’s dead.
“I’m totally distraught. It was no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes.
“As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified.
“He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket.
“Maybe he might have had something concealed under there, I don’t know. But it looked out of place in the weather we’ve been having.
“He was quite large, big built, quite a sort of chubby guy.
“I was crouched down and basically ran as fast as I could in a crouched position. I just was worried about bullets flying around.
“It was just an instinctive reaction to get out – people running in all directions, looks of horror on their faces, screaming, a lot of screaming from women, absolute mayhem.
“And the smell of cordite as well, the gunpowder smell, that sort of acrid sort of gunpowder smell.
“It was an absolute nightmare. I’m just waiting for the pubs to open to be quite honest – nice stiff Scotch.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I saw them kill a man basically. I saw them shoot a man five times.”
The Brits don’t fool around.
CORRECTION: It wasn’t Scotland Yard that shot the terror dude, it was the London Metropolitan Police. Sorry for the mistake. See CNN for more details.
UPDATE: It turns out that the suspect, for all his suspicious behavior, wasn’t actually involved with the terrorists. That doesn’t mean I fault the police for shooting him, because the climate of fear the terrorists created was the real culprit. That’s what terror does, after all.
Not to be pedantic, but haiku has to have a 5-7-5 phoneme count. Or did I mispronounce the last line?
Er, ummm… do you ever print retractions?
And not only is the phoneme structure of your haiku wrong, but there’s no implicit seasonal reference.
Try again, grasshopper.
2 things:
Haiku does NOT have to have a 5-7-5 syllabic structure. Even the Japanese masters, including Basho himself, did not always follow a 5-7-5 structure. English-language haiku has never followed rules of form; haiku can be rhyming/non-rhyming, one line or three lines, even vertical like Japanese. Nowadays among Japanese writers of haiku, only the most traditional follow the 5-7-5 form.
That said, what’s to celebrate in the shooting of someone who was at first cited as only a “suspect” & is now being cited as having no connection with the bombings?
I deviate from the strict definition of haiku in order to avoid paying royalties to the Haiku Academy, but we are in a season of terrorism just now.
My contribution (sure to be jeered out of the room):
There once was a man from Japan
Whose poetry no one could scan.
When told this was so, he replied
“Yes,this I know.
That’s because I always try to squeeze just as many words into the last line as possibly I can!”
Anyway, it’s always tragic when an innocent person is harmed (or killed). But he had many opportunities to stop before he was shot, and better for someone acting suspiciously to be shot than for a whole trainful of people to be blown up by a representative of the Religion of Pieces.
Yes, it’s always sad when an innocent is killed. As I see it, this guy is another casualty of 7/7.
My goodness, an “incorrect” haiku.
No such thing as “correct” or “incorrect” in haiku.
*
Kudos for removing it though out of respect for the dead man’s innocence.