Summer School Haiku (3)

After Summer, Winter:
Wishing the snow would not fall
Is wasted regret

Summer School Haiku (2)

Nervousness shaking
Like leaves on autumnal trees:
Seasons always end

Summer School Haiku (1)

Andrew: Summer school -
Craves puppy-dog attention.
This year, this is it

(Remember Haiku is more than just syllable counting.)

Ongoing 63,64 and 65, Harrow Daily Poems 19,20,21

I was struggling with the next few pictures and I have several half written attempts which I don't like for each of them. Then it occurred to me that the three pictures in question would actually fit quite well together.

There is a dog. There is a cat. There is a frog sitting on the edge of a pond.

I had seen two children playing under the trees the other day, teaching a dog to fetch a rubber ball, a task it was attempting with considerable enthusiasm but very little skill. Meanwhile, lying in the sun on a nearby garage roof was a large tabby cat, just watching them. There were no frogs in the real picture, but real life is rarely perfect.

Three Haiku

Children and their dog;
Catch-ball choreography
Beneath whispering trees.

The pavilion roof;
A comfortable cat watches
Children and their dog.

Shaded by reeds
Frogs grumble in the water;
Park life surrounds them.

Ongoing 10

The next picture in the book shows two doctors dissecting an alien. I got the poem idea immediately but struggled with it. Then it occurred to me that it was ideally suited to a Haiku.

The Chinese Village

I was alien,
a pale specimen skewered;
silent winter eyes.

Anybody who has ever visited rural China will understand this verse perfectly.

Haiku

I’ve decided that if I’m going to continue with this project, I might as well make it a bit more instructive, not to mention a bit more interesting for myself. The trouble with something as open as “a poem a day” is that it doesn’t really focus the mind on producing your best work.
So I’m going to use a variety of different verse forms. Last week I posted a Fibonacci poem, a relatively modern form with a syllable count based on the Fibonacci sequence 0,1,1,2,3,5,8.
Fibs (as they are commonly known) exemplify a form of verse that doesn’t rhyme – doesn’t need to anyway. Some people will claim that if it doesn’t rhyme then it isn’t a poem, ignoring the fact that for the majority of the world and for the majority of history, rhyme has been only one small aspect of one small section of poetry. Perhaps the most well-known form of syllable-count poems is the Haiku. A Japanese form it doesn’t really adapt perfectly to English though many people have produced some very fine English Haiku.
The simple Haiku rules are that they should be three lines long with five syllables in the first and third lines and seven in the second. Of course, as with most things, I think you will find it’s more complicated than that. Traditional Haiku is related to nature, is often about a single season, has an audible pause (or in Japanese a “cutting word”) which breaks it into two thematically related sections (Usually, but not always, at the end of line one or two).
English haiku sometimes breaks any and all of the above rules.

So, let’s have some haiku. (Caution: just because I understand the rules, it doesn’t mean I am any good at the form.)

.

My year

as old leaves wither
new life fills the colleges:
chasing the future

snow, ice and blizzards:
keep faith through the darkest hours
the sun will return

blossoms returning
and new worlds lie before you:
this is your future

the hills of Harrow
are overgrown with children:
foreign summer sounds