Five-Seven-Five is Sublime

I have been inspired of late to write in haiku. For the few who don't know, a haiku is a type of Japanese poem written in three lines of seventeen syllables. The first line has five syllables, the second seven, and the third five. There are many beautiful haiku written in Japanese. Unfortunately for us, the structure does not translate into English. The greatest haiku, though extreme in brevity, have beautiful imagery. Often the last line has a punch to it, making the reader's head spin. The last line is supposed to make you think.

I like playing with the structure of haiku, in English of course. As someone who tends to be overly verbose in her writing, the limiting nature of haiku makes for a good exercise in saying more with less. I've gotten fairly good at it, except for the last line being the grand finish it is intended to be. I am seldom very good at that. Often times, I end up with a bunch of haiku on the same subject, none of them good enough to stand on their own. However, I don't like to be wasteful, so I sometimes "recycle" these short, inadequate poems into one longer one. The individual haiku become stanzas in a poem that I think is stronger and more expressive of my intent. That is what I ended up doing recently with a series of haiku.

I am sharing three poems with you. The first you will find at the end of this post. It is an example of a haiku that lacks that special punch. But it still has some charm, and so I decided to share it. The second is a longer poem, a series of haiku, concerning a subject that is often on my mind. The illustration is from the National Gallery of Art website: http://www.nga.gov/home.htm. It happens to be one of my favorite depictions of the Crucifixion. It was supposedly painted for the private devotions and prayers of a Dominican nun.  The third is another single haiku and a little better than the first. It was inspired by my in-laws' recent landscaping project. It has a little bit more zing to it. The illustrations are indeed the before and after photographs of the landscaping project in question.

Here is a haiku to start the ball rolling.

Opportunity

All my energy
Drained in monthly bloodletting.
Knock on door ignored.