Four Days of Haiku: Learning to Speak

As I wrote yesterday, my road back to poetry was broken and crooked beyond crooked. So what changed? What got me not only writing poetry again but even willing to post it?

It was my long ago high school classmates, now good friends thanks to Facebook, that provided the final nudge. One of our number, Kate, starting posting a daily haiku about her Bay Area commute. Others of us starting chiming in with little pieces of our own, and soon we had spun off a separate Facebook group, Haiku-ca-choo!, launched in January of this year.

Haiku was an easy way to ease back into poetry. Haiku is often described as a seventeen syllable Japanese poetry form, often written in three lines with a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. In reality, haiku has far more complexity and variation to it in its traditional Japanese form. But for someone coming back to poetry after a long layoff, Americanized haiku was perfect. It was short, it was simple, and all I had to do to write it was count syllables on my fingers.

Below in one of the earliest works I posted in Haiku-ca-choo!

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Red cherries, white snow.

Ornamentals, yes, but birds

don't turn up their beaks.