Day Seventeen International Haiku Day!

Updated:

Robert Lee Brewer’s has his AprPAD 2017 post  up & it is so good – I’m

just going to lift and place it here …

“AprPAD 2017 : “Today is a special day for so many reasons, but one in the poetic realm is that today is International Haiku Poetry Day. It always falls on April 17, because of National Poetry Month and the 17 syllables in many (though not all) haiku. This year is extra special because the year is ’17 as well.”

For today’s AprPAD 2017 prompt, write a dance poem.

NaPoWriMo’s featured participant is Yesterday and today: Merril’s historical musings,  with a Day 16 correspondence poem. Their featured poet is Hoa Nguyen, I haven’t taken a look at her work yet today … but I will!

NaPoWriMO’s prompt today is to  write a nocturne. In music, a nocturne is a composition meant to be played at night, usually for piano, and with a tender and melancholy sort of sound. Yes – I’l make a poerty form page for this term ….

As for my personal Poem A Day Challenge , today’s PAD is … a fish boat.

So, WOW, International Hiaku Day!

I love haiku’s – I have written 744 of them! Haiku is a japanes form consisting of 3 lines (1st 5 limited to 5 syllables, 2nd line to 7, last line back to 5) about nature. They are tiny bits of poetic deliciousness.  A comapct, complex literary truffle. I even am compiling a separate collection just for my haiku‘s – well, haikus, tankas and other japanese foramts. Hmmm. why don’t i have apage for that in my Poetry Forms yet?

When I am having writer’s block, hiaku’s are one of the tools I bring out to help me blast that barrier. Hyper-focusing on just one subject and selcting the right – savory – words to flesh out an image or concept, honing them down to just seventeen brief syllables.

Of course that’s not to say there are some variations and flexiblity with the haiku form. if you write about something not nature-based, that haiku is then called a senryu. If  seventeen syllables is not enough, you can string your poem with a multiple of haiku’s, as I did in the poem below.

It is a form that work especially well for photo prompts. Poetry,.com used to run a Photo prompt a day & it was one of the website I would check before I started work that day; it would get the gears in my brain speeding on track. Three of those daily poems have won various poetry contests. (Poetry.com was my gateway drug into sharing poetry on-line; this website? All thanks to Poetry.com’s influence. Still have a number of my early pieces in their archive there.)

Now may be a good time to remind you that Gina Weld Hulse has had a Haiku Poem-A-Day (PAD) challenge going this month; no daily prompts, just a committment to write a haiku a day. (I mentioned it on Apr 7th)  Check out her pieces!

I am going to try to do a haiku with each of the prompts today … How about you?

This is  a string of haikus one January morning; it started with one, and then as soon as I wrote it down, another would follow – like trundle bugs in a line.

Ode in Haiku

 
I’m waiting until
… the last possible second
to leave you. Heat. (hmmmm)

My haiku this morn.
Ode to my bed; blankets left.
Poor abandoned thing.

My feet on the floor
soaking in dawn’s cold prelude;
clothed, not fast enough.
 
Give me borrowed warmth,
radiated heat to loose
my tightened flesh. (hmmmm)

Trees become shadows,
separated by froze fog;
now softened substance.
 
Their blankets left them,
fell to earth & decomposed.
Never leave me. Please.

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