Tag: haiku

Snow day and dishwashing haiku

Just as the deep snow here had melted to half-gone and I’d broken usable trails through the month-old snowpack remaining, a new storm blew in, dropped another five or six inches, and undid my hope for a winter thaw.   Two more storms over the next three days are expected to fluff things up even more.   While I work up the energy to go out and re-break trails €”for myself and for animals, on whom this unnaturally long winter has been very stressful €”I thought I’d try something different at WIZ to pass time.

Traditionally, haiku express insight into the movement of a season across the face of a landscape.   But since the form is of a meditative mind, its nature can be stretched to explore particulars of a variety of conditions.   In a recent conversation with greenfrog, topics of awareness and dishwashing flowed together.   The prospect of dishwashing haiku arose.   Well €¦ and why not?

So for WIZ’s next winter while-away open invitation, the name is dishwashing (which I happen to find especially pleasant in wintertime); the game is haiku.

To begin:

Warm tap water, cool
Winter light pouring in streak
Plates in kitchen sync.

Let the One-liners begin.

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Winter haiku

[Post edited 12/17.]   Since this haiku chain launched itself before I had a chance to lay groundwork, I thought I’d backtrack and provide some perhaps useful information.

A haiku is a classical Japanese poetical form, usually 17 syllables all in a single line in Japanese, but I understand that there are longer and shorter forms.   In English, haiku usually take the form of one short line of 5 syllables, a long line of 7 syllables, and a short line of 5 syllables.   I’ve misplaced all my haiku notes, but you can find out more here or here.

Here’s my beginning haiku:

Colorful beads drape
Desert grasses–frost parsing
Light’s long white sentence.