Haiku for happiness.

I heart haiku.

Monday morning rush

My summer heart beats wildly

Possibility

My love of Haiku is widely known. What do I love about Haiku? The clean simplicity. The direct impact of 3 short lines of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.

The Haiku collection

My dear friends threw me a wedding shower last September and all of the guests were asked to write a haiku as a gift. The haiku were then collected and made into a beautiful book (above), which now sits on my desk. I was so moved by this gift. In the thank you cards I wrote an individual haiku back to each person. I didn’t  keep a copy of any of them for myself.

One of my former “projects” years ago was cloth bags with funny haiku on them. I still have a lot of the “practice” silk-screen swatches that I made. I am thinking up a project for them as they are languishing in a box at the moment.

At best, my haiku come out as quirky and they do not follow any of the tradition rules, but I still love writing them. (Poets everywhere feel an inexplicable cold shiver run through them when I pick up the pen to write.) Maybe one day I will take up proper study but in the meantime I just keep writing.

This is a grocery list not a haiku. No one really liked this bag so I made a pillow out of it.

Have you ever written a haiku? Look around you the next time are waiting in a grocery store line up, or taking an after dinner walk, or on a coffee break at the office and make up a little haiku about what you observe around you. Careful, It can become very addictive. Before you know it you are tapping out syllables on your fingers at the dinner table.

Haiku plural haiku, is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively.[1] Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji or verbal caesura. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku.[2] Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century. Source: Wikipedia