Leap Day

NaHaiWriMo- Day 29

And the final February NaHaiWriMo prompt: “leaping, leap year, or leap day”.

one small leap puddle jumping

Generating a Haiku

NaHaiWriMo- Day 28

In the same vein as yesterday, our prompt today was to go to a haiku generating website, and rewrite the haiku that we found there. Talk about over-the-top…

GENERATED HAIKU:

sadly, juniper
bragging ruminations slurp
faintly, dimly short

AND MY REWRITE:

juniper berries
the bitter taste
of reminiscence

Deliberately Bad

NaHaiWriMo- Day 27

Today’s prompt was to write a deliberately bad haiku. It turns out it wasn’t so easy! Sometimes a haiku was so “bad” that it was actually quite funny– almost a “good” senryu. So I had to work hard to create something that was so over-the-top that no one could actually take me seriously. Here it is:

Stygian swamp
six scaly, somnolent snakes
slither surreptitiously

 

Lingering Cold and Night Lights

The first Shiki kukai I participated in was in March 2010, and I’ve entered every one since. What I like best about the kukai is that the voting is anonymous, meaning that each haiku rises or falls on its own merits. Which means that someone who is fairly new to haiku is suddenly on the same footing as someone who has been writing haiku for decades. For February, the kigo was “lingering cold” and the free form topic was “night lights” (of the astronomy type). My “lingering cold” haiku took 2nd place, with 28 points, while my “shooting star” haiku received 9 points.

lingering cold
 the long ride home
 from the cemetery

shooting star
 my wish
always the same

The full February results can be read here.

Z is for Zip

NaHaiWriMo- Day 26

And so we come to the end of the alphabet… Three more days remain to February NaHaiWriMo, but this is it for the letter prompts. I must say that I have been more than pleased with this month. There is a certain energy that is generated when so many haiku poets, both fresh and seasoned, enthusiastically not only write haiku, regardless of the difficulty of the prompts, but also take the time to comment on other’s haiku. My goal was to have fun, develop a stronger sense of what makes a haiku work, and to cultivate new and existing haiku friendships. I succeeded on all counts!

broken zipper
all the things
I might have done

Y is for Yellow

NaHaiWriMo- Day 25

dreaming in yellow wild buttercups

X is for… X

NaHaiWriMo- Day 24

flecks
on the x-ray
winter storm

Fog

Fog is one of my favorite topics to write haiku about, as it is a regular occurence around these parts. So way back in August, when Terri Hale French’s NaHaiWriMo prompt for the 17th was to write an experimental haiku, I decided to write a concrete haiku on fog. My original haiku was written in a column:

F
walking
O
through
G

For some reason, which I can’t quite recall anymore, I submitted it as a one-liner when I sent it off to the  Frogpond haiku journal:

F walking O through G

I’m very curious to hear which one people think is more effective. Someone even suggested making it diagonal, which is a cool idea, especially if I was more adept at playing around with form. Anyway, this is my first “eyeku”, as George Swede dubbed it, and I was very happy to see it appear on the pages of Frogpond, which just arrived in the mail today.

Caribbean Kigo Kukai #31

It’s always fun to see the results of the Caribbean Kigo Kukai, and to find out who wrote what. Kind of like the unmasking at a masquerade ball, not that I’ve actually been to one. The kigo this month was “footsteps”. My haiku:

footsteps receding
in the distance
morning solitude

It netted 6 pts, and the following (anonymous) comment: ” I like the way the poet has adapted the familiar ‘winter solitude’ kigo to the theme of the kukai.” Read all the haiku from this kukai here.

Basho’s Frogpond, Revisited

I had a real Basho moment today. I was walking the dog by the pond, when suddenly I heard a loud plop. My first thought was that someone had thrown a large rock into the pond, but looking around, I saw that pup and I were alone. Was it a frog? Not wanting puppy to go ballistic, I didn’t dare approach too close in case it was something he wanted to chase. All I saw were trailing ripples, and for the whole time I stood there, nothing emerged.

old pond
when I look again
only ripples