#haiku on love
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Flowers of a Different Name
I have known the hands that told me they were pulling weeds from my garden, and instead left the whole plot barren.
I have known hands that told me they simply wished to enjoy the experience of laying in my fields, but never wished to plant roots. Passersby have said “How lovely, but too much work.”
I have known hands that told me my flowerbeds are beautiful, but I should have only raised all organic, non-GMO options, but yet, they still poisoned my ground all the same.
My garden is too dark, my garden is too big, my garden is wasted space, soiled ground, too overgrown with diversity to manage, too sparse to be productive.
And then I came to know you. You asked me about the seeds I have sown and why I chose them. You admired the stubbornness of the weeds, the beauty of the blooms, and smiled in the patches of sunlight that bled through the canopy of trees overhead. You offered your hands for what hopes I had, but respected my need to tend the garden on my own. You soothed my aching shoulders, and kissed my sunburnt face.
And then I walked through your garden, enjoying the change, noting that no two gardens are ever the same. Though I am new to your garden, and I don’t yet know the flowers by name, I will help you to grow them, all the same.
#haiku poetry#haiku poem#poem#haiku#lovely haiku#love haiku#daily haiku#poetry#love poem#love#haiku poet#lovers#relationship#poet#haikuaday#haiku on love#I love him#garden#flowers#growth#healing
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buried and unknown,
my heart becomes ecstatic
when I meet your eyes
Mees Goudbeek
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WAKE UP,
HAIKU BOT JUST REBLOGGED ONE OF YOUR COMICS
BLESSED BY HAIKU BOT ONCE AGAIN
(here’s the post)
#ask reply#HAIKU BOT I LOVE YOU#holy shit Michael Afton haiku#genuinely the funniest thing it could of reblogged#thank you for telling me anon I would of definitely missed this otherwise#Haiku bot is a canon Michael Afton fan 💜#makes sense robots love Michael
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a murder to solve, espio’s verses delight, haiku answer all
#my art#espio#espio the chameleon#sth#the murder of sonic the hedgehog#i so so so fucking love poet espio#wish he did haiku though#and i think most of them should have dogshit third lines#did not intend for this to be my first murder art but it took a grip of me and would not let me be#i don’t think ive ever drawn espio b4
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this post is for the
haiku bot and the haiku
bot only. love you
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the haiku bot is a baby to me. i want to tuck it in bed.
❤️❤️
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None Of You Know What Haiku Are
I'm going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is... really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.
If you ask most English-speaking people (or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it's a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That's certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since... idk elementary school when I learned that, I've learned that that's actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of... dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?
Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!
First of all, Japanese doesn't have syllables! There's a few different names for what phonetic units actually make up the language- In Japanese, they're called "On" (音), which translates to "sound", although English-language linguists often call it a "mora" (μ), which (quoting from Wikipedia here) "is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable." (x) "Oh" is one syllable, and also one mora, whereas "Oi" has one syllable, but two moras. "Ba" has one mora, "Baa" has two moras, etc. In English, we would say that a haiku is made up of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables in them, 17 syllables total. In Japanese, that would be 17 sounds.
For an example of the difference, the word "haiku", in English, has 2 syllables (hai-ku), but in Japanese, はいく has 3 sounds (ha-i-ku). "Christmas" has 2 syllables, but in Japanese, "クリスマス" (ku-ri-su-ma-su) is 5 sounds! that's a while line on its own! Sometimes the syllables are the same as the sounds ("sushi" is two syllables, and すし is two sounds), but sometimes they're very different.
In addition, words in Japanese are frequently longer than their English equivalents. For example, the word "cuckoo" in Japanese is "ほととぎす" (hototogisu).
Now, I'm sure you're all very impressed at how I can use an English to Japanese dictionary (thank you, my mother is proud), but what does any of this matter? So two languages are different. How does that impact our understanding of haiku?
Well, if you think about the fact that Japanese words are frequently longer than English words, AND that Japanese counts sounds and not syllables, you can see how, "based purely on a 17-syllable counting method, a poet writing in English could easily slip in enough words for two haiku in Japanese” (quote from Grit, Grace, and Gold: Haiku Celebrating the Sports of Summer by Kit Pancoast Nagamura). If you're writing a poem using 17 English syllables, you are writing significantly more content than is in an authentic Japanese haiku.
(Also not all Japanese haiku are 17 sounds at all. It's really more of a guideline.)
Focusing on the 5-7-5 form leads to ignoring other strategies/common conventions of haiku, which personally, I think are more interesting! Two of the big ones are kigo, a season word, and kireji, a cutting word.
Kigo are words/phrases/images associated with a particular season, like snow for winter, or cherry blossoms for spring. In Japan, they actually publish reference books of kigo called saijiki, which is basically like a dictionary or almanac of kigo, describing the meaning, providing a list of related words, and some haiku that use that kigo. Using a a particular kigo both grounds the haiku in a particular time, but also alludes to other haiku that have used the same one.
Kireji is a thing that doesn't easily translate to English, but it's almost like a spoken piece of punctuation, separating the haiku into two parts/images that resonate with and add depth to each other. Some examples of kireji would be "ya", "keri", and "kana." Here's kireji in action in one of the most famous haiku:
古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音
(Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto)
(The old pond —
A frog jumps in
The sound of the water.)
You can see the kireji at the end of the first line- 古池や literally translates to "old pond ya". The "ya" doesn't have linguistic meaning, but it denotes the separation between the two focuses of the haiku. First, we are picturing a pond. It's old, mature. The water is still. And then there's a frog! It's spring and he's fresh and new to the world! He jumps into the pond and goes "splash"! Wowie! When I say "cutting word", instead of say, a knife cutting, I like to imagine a film cut. The camera shows the pond, and then it cuts to the frog who jumps in.
English doesn't really have a version of this, at least not one that's spoken, but in English language haiku, people will frequently use a dash or an ellipses to fill the same role.
Format aside, there are also some conventions of the actual content, too. They frequently focus on nature, and are generally use direct language without metaphor. They use concrete images without judgement or analysis, inviting the reader to step into their shoes and imagine how they'd feel in the situation. It's not about describing how you feel, so much as it's about describing what made you feel.
Now, let's put it all together, looking at a haiku written Yosa Buson around 1760 (translated by Harold G. Henderson)
The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel
We've got our kigo with "the piercing chill." We read that, and we imagine it's probably winter. It's cold, and the kind of cold wind that cuts through you. There's our kireji- this translation uses a colon to differentiate our two images: the piercing chill, and the poet stepping on his dead wife's comb. There's no descriptions of what the poet is feeling, but you can imagine stepping into his shoes. You can imagine the pain he's experiencing in that moment on your own.
"But tumblr user corvidcall!" I hear you say, "All the examples you've used so far are Japanese haiku that have been translated! Are you implying that it's impossible for a good haiku to be written in English?" NO!!!!! I love English haiku! Here's a good example, which won first place in the 2000 Henderson haiku contest, sponsored by the Haiku Society of America:
meteor shower . . .
a gentle wave
wets our sandals
When you read this one, can you imagine being in the poet's place? Do you feel the surprise as the tide comes in? Do you feel the summer-ness of the moment? Haiku are about describing things with the senses, and how you take in the world around you. In a way, it's like the poet is only setting a scene, which you inhabit and fill with meaning based on your own experiences. You and I are imagining different beaches, different waves, different people that make up the "our" it mentioned.
"Do I HAVE to include all these things when I write haiku? If I include all these things, does that mean my haiku will be good?" I mean, I don't know. What colors make up a good painting? What scenes make up a good play? It's a creative medium, and nobody can really tell you you can't experiment with form. Certainly not me! But I think it's important to know what the conventions of the form are, so you can appreciate good examples of it, and so you can know what you're actually experimenting with. And I mean... I'm not the poetry cops. But if you're not interested in engaging with the actual conventions and limitations of the form, then why are you even using that form?
I'll leave you with one more English language haiku, which is probably my favorite haiku ever. It was written by Tom Bierovic, and won first place at the 2021 Haiku Society of America Haiku Awards
a year at most . . .
we pretend to watch
the hummingbirds
Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)
Further reading:
Forms in English Haiku by Keiko Imaoka
Haiku: A Whole Lot More Than 5-7-5 by Jack
How to Write a Bad Haiku by KrisL
Haiku Are Not a Joke: A Plea from a Poet Who Has Had It Up to Here by Sandra Simpson
Haiku Checklist by Katherine Raine
#poetry#haiku#writing#literature#anime life#long post#i want to apologize but i had to get something off my chest#and the thing was. i love haiku#and when i see posts on here about haiku. i get so angy.#well ok i really get more disappointed bc nobody is really engaging with the form on its own terms#anyway i hope you enjoy some of my favorite haiku because theyre in there!!!!!#i didnt really get into the history of haiku. and i also did not get into why i got really into it#but i will say that i was really inspired by Jacob Geller's video A Thousand Ways of Seeing a Forest#which is a lot about translation#(which i mean. as an interpreter AND a poetry-enjoyer. really appealed to me lol)
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When you make a post, do you count the syllables for haiku-bot bait?
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Monday April 17.
National Haiku Poetry Day.
Sometimes less really is more. And other times a lot less is a lot more. Which is why today, this Monday April 17, we are joining in the celebrations for National Haiku Poetry Day, as devised and implemented by The Haiku Foundation back in 2012. Because things don't get a lot more more for a lot less less than the old art of Haiku, in which a frog leaping in a pond, the profundity of a drop of few, the light of a candle, a blooming poppy, a howling wind, or the taste of rain can be distilled and expressed with such compelling and elusive intrigue—and such economy of words. These are works which require very little time at all in the act of reading, but sit and linger and echo for a long time thereafter. They resonate, in the truest sense of the word. Tumblr being Tumblr, the writing community here is home to more than a few talented Haiku poets, as you can see for yourself over at #haiku poetry.
And Tumblr being Tumblr, of course, this community is home to one particular talent notable in the art of Haiku: @the-haiku-bot, a bot which, in their own words: "Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up." This is a bot that can prise moments of poetry from even the most innocuous post, and, we would contend, makes the perfect way to celebrate #haiku poetry and today's national commemoration. Trans sex? 17 syllables? Your aunt? Long rants? The Turing test? There is nothing—nothing—this mysterious little bot cannot accomplish.
#today on tumblr#haiku poetry#national haiku poetry day#love haiku#short poem#writers and poets#creative writing#writeblr#writers on tumblr#poem#original poetry#original poets on tumblr#haiku bot#original haiku bot poetry on tumblr
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Life comes with many sharp edges,
Meetings with teeth bared
And hackles pointedly raised,
Poised to pounce
At the slightest of slights.
You cusp my edges in your hands,
Careful not to cut yourself
On my sharpened teeth,
Born from years of defense.
My form begins to thaw,
My mind relaxing under your gaze.
I realize love is so many things
That I’ve thought of a hundred different ways
And been told of a thousand ways more,
But this is something I haven’t felt before.
Your presence is soft and comfortable,
Like a blanket inviting me to take a rest,
Have a laugh,
Life isn’t meant to be so serious.
I can lay down my sword with you,
And just enjoy the view.
Lovely Haiku
#haiku poetry#haiku poem#poem#haiku#lovely haiku#love haiku#daily haiku#poetry#love poem#love#haiku poet#lovers#relationship#poet#haikuaday#haiku on love
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morning tenderness
bathe yourself in the sunrise
whisper love to me
Mees Goudbeek
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it's october now; the spooky season is here; scary haiku time
is this my brand now
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https://www.tumblr.com/the-haiku-bot/738250169066389504/the-fnaf-animatronics-arent-evil-just
YOU HAVE BEEN HAIKU BOTTED
I’ve been blessed by Haiku bot,,
#ask reply#it’s official I’m part of tumblr lore now#I can’t believe I almost missed this tysm for telling me#I love you Haiku bot#tumblrs Roomba 💜#added the link to the post 💜💜💜
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A couple of hermits playing TCG! From that time a few days ago on Cleo's stream :DD The hermits are getting addicted and it's really fun to watch them nerd it out!!
#Hermit tcg#Ethoslab#zombiecleo#docm77#joe hills#hermitcraft#Hermitcraft fanart#Hermitblr#Etho#Digital art#Yeah I just wanted to draw something quick but lingered too long so here it is :DD#I love Joe Hills doing haiku on the fly too
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You don’t meet souls. You don’t go around looking for soul connections. It isn’t a choice and you recognise them immediately. And know that they’re rare. Not anyone you connect with is a soul connection. A true soul connection is immediate, mutual and life altering.
(photo credit @estherscanon )
#poets on tumblr#love quotes#love poetry#romantic poetry#love poem#romantic writer#onurtaskiran poetry#poets and writers#gentleman poet#love#poetrybyonur#spilled ink#writers on tumblr#haiku#haiku poetry#soul connection#rare#recognition#soul friend
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I want simple things
Like folding laundry with you
Anything would do
#spilled thoughts#original writing#haiku#haikus#my haiku#love poetry#love poem#my writing#poets on tumblr#poetry#poets and writers#my poetry#poem#i miss you#poet corner#poetblr#poetry writing#poems#short poems
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