Do You Haiku?

Haiku

Black and white and read

These seventeen syllables

Feed my hungry soul

It is still April, and you know what that means – it is still National Poetry Month!

If you’ve been dragging your lyrical feet and have yet to put your poetic pen to page, then today is the day to clear your conscience! You, too, can Haiku!

Remember long, long ago when you were first learning to print words with those chubby pencils and fat-lined paper? Well, that was probably around the time you wrote your first Haiku. Haiku has always been one of the stones teachers use to kill two language arts birds at the same time – poetry and syllables. Score!

While you may not have kept the little gem you wrote way back then, it most likely went something like this –

Toad

Rude green hoppy thing

Peeing when children catch me

Talking loud in burps

Okay, maybe your first Haiku wasn’t like this, but Richie Richendifer insisted that it followed our teacher’s recipe.

“Describe something in nature,” Miss Henry said. “And remember the 5-7-5 rule. Use 5 syllables for the first line, 7 syllables for the second line, and 5 syllables for the last line, and you will make a great Haiku.”

“Gesundheit!” said Richie Richendifer… for the 87^th time that day.

Even if you haven’t wielded a chubby pencil in years, you can follow Miss Henry’s fabulous recipe for your own Haiku stew. And you don’t really have to stick with the nature part. You’re welcome to use your mind’s elbow to bend and stretch that rule like my son did with his poetic offering –

Bad Haiku

Bad poem this is

It is extremely boring

Wait… was that too long?

Nuts never fall far from the tree.

PROMPT: Haiku! Haiku! It’s what we’ve got to do! Yeah, I’m pretty sure the 7 dwarfs sang these work song words every April – now you can, too.

And speaking of April – it will be over in a flash, so express your poetic self while you still can! Believe me, you’ll regret it if you don’t – May is National High Blood Pressure Education Month… God knows how inspiring that’s going to be.