Tag: haiku

Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / Week #37

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was sunny with an additional photo prompt

sunny day–
the heron takes a bit
of river with him

Lafcadio

You could see water dripping down the heron as it lifts off from the water. And if you are mindful and there isn’t much noise at this moment, you might even hear the sound of water falling back into the river between the wing flaps.

Picture this with the sun behind the heron, likely at sunrise or sunset, the glare of the golden sun in the river, and then in the drops falling into it, a glint on the heron’s wet wings and legs – what an image!

Even after a bit of the river falls back, the heron’s legs and feathers would still be wet – the heron taking the river to the tree it nests in far inland. Wonderful imagery.

Continue reading “Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / Week #37” →

#HaikuSeed – Tips and Guidelines

A Few Tips About Writing Haiku:

  • A good haiku consists of two images juxtaposed together using as simple a language as possible allowing the reader to visualize the scene and fill all the things left unsaid.
  • Usually in haiku, one image acts as a fragment and the other as a phrase. These two are traditionally separated by a keriji (cutting word). In English, we make use of punctuation like ellipses (…), em-dash (—) and other characters to denote a cut/break between the two images. This break between the two images in the haiku has a lot of significance and plays a major role in how deep and vivid your haiku becomes in the reader’s mind. It is not merely a punctuation!
  • The #HaikuSeed prompt is just that – a seed. Your haiku need not feature the prompt word as long as the haiku is triggered from the prompt word and contains some aspect relevant to the prompt word.
  • Try to use a kigo (seasonal word/reference/context) in your haiku, be it the prompt word itself or something else you find apt as historically the likes of Basho, Issa, Buson have created wonders with haiku themed around nature, allowing portals to open up in the reader’s minds into unseen and unexperienced worlds.

Useful Resources To Learn More About Haiku

  1. The Heart of a Haiku by Kala Ramesh – The British Haiku Society
  2. New to Haiku? – The Haiku Foundation

Submission Guidelines

There are three ways you can submit your haiku written for #HaikuSeed prompt:

  1. On Twitter, use hashtag #HaikuSeed in your tweet along with your haiku.
  2. On your blog/website, add a link to this post so we get a pingback that allows us to be aware of your blogpost hosting your haiku.
  3. Leave your haiku as a comment here with your name.

Please submit only 2 or 3 haiku for each prompt. We strongly request writers to not spam the #HaikuSeed hashtag on Twitter for other haiku you’ve not written for our prompt as it becomes difficult to sift through all the entries each week.

Hope wonderful haiku blossom from our #HaikuSeed prompts.

🍃🍃🍃

War Is a Kigo – Featured Haiku With Commentary / Patterns

A note from our founding editor Sankara Jayanth: We do not mean to be insensitive and we have no intention to disrespect personnel who serve their country or died serving their country in war. But war is war. Murder is murder and that is what happens in war, no matter how proudly and how righteously someone does it. Patriotism is a very tilted scale to gauge someone’s humanity. So you will not find here haiku or commentary that praise laurels to soldiers and armies who defended this country or that. This column will be about everything that war affects, poisons and kills, so please understand this motivation and intention of ours before determining something we talk about here being insensitive. But we will listen to reason and if we are insensitive, we will learn from it and be better. This column comes purely from a rage and angst about the violence we bring upon every living thing on earth while also being believers of religions and gods and heaven and what not.

We have Arvinder Kaur‘s haunting haiku written for the #HaikuSeed pattern to thank for seeding the idea for this new column on our journal where we will dive into the featured haiku, starting with the image of war painted by it and then following the trail to darker places that exist right behind the verse.

pattern bombing
fireflies flicker in and out
of the empty trenches

– Arvinder Kaur, @arvinder8

Pattern bombing is a tactical strategy where aircrafts drop bombs in a predetermined pattern and timing to produce the desired effect. And the desired effect they are going for is usually murder of humans and any living thing that happens to be in their canvas for murder.

Is the writer being allegorical when she says fireflies flicker in and out of empty trenches? Are the flashes of lights rising from the trenches souls of dead soldiers?

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Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / 21 – 27 March, 2022

Featuring haiku brought to blossom by terrific writers from #HaikuSeed prompts:
bird, porch, high tide, enter, butterfly, summer moon

heatwave—
the sunbird prefers my window
to the frangipani

– Alaka Y.
@alwrites

A wonderful haiku. After I finished reading, it felt like I’m experiencing sweltering heat myself, but without company of the sunbird that was here on my windowsill just a moment ago.

When haiku become specific about species of flora and fauna, it can be a hit or miss from the reader’s perspective.

Photo by Erik Karits from Pexels

I assume one of the reasons for a miss is not being familiar with the type of birds/flowers and their relationship to various seasons. I’m guilty of having only little knowledge about these things. Having said that, it more often than not does not matter.

As a reader, I guess our mind usually substitutes a vague alternative for that flower, this bird when we don’t know specifics about them. And it is wonderful that the haiku’s sensory effect is still experienced by the readers even after we blatantly replace the writer’s well thought-out subjects with hazy forms.

So when using such specific identification in the haiku does work, it transports the reader to a different place and they are almost convinced it is a moment they have experienced themselves. This haiku does that.

🍂 🌿 🍀 🍁 🍃

Continue reading “Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / 21 – 27 March, 2022” →