Write Tribe,  Writing

Haikus for a Writing Prompt

Pine Needles After Rain 2 by timage, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License  by  timage 

Wednesday’s prompt on WriteTribe is to write a proper haiku. Many thanks to Ruchira Shukla for the succinct lesson. In brief, an English-language haiku should have 17 syllables in three lines with the pattern 5 / 7 / 5, it should mention or make reference to a season (kigo), and should have a juxtaposition. A juxtaposition is where one of the lines is grammatically separate from the other two. This last one is harder than it sounds.

Further, we were asked to make ‘rain’ the kigo, as it is currently the rainy season in India, where WriteTribe is based. Not to mention here in Atlanta, where it has rained almost every day for several weeks, it seems.

But rain means so many things to me. Rain has different personalities. There’s the light rain that falls straight down, leaving dry patches under everything. There’s the driving sheets of rain that stop traffic. There’s horizontal rain that hits windows with the force of pebbles and make you check your roof for leaks. There’s spitting rain that’s not really worth getting out an umbrella for, but it will leave you just as wet. So I did not constrain myself to just one haiku. So there.

Here are my six ‘rain’ haiku. Note that I chose to actually avoid the word ‘rain’ and instead obliquely refer to it, as it was one of the techniques mentioned by the page at WriteTribe. I’m also sure I didn’t accomplish a juxtaposition in at least three of them. Maybe.

Cicadas droning.
Thundershower’s pitter-pat.
Soothing susurrus.
Low, grey, dreary skies.
Children laugh with abandon.
Puddles for splashing.
   
Musty petrichor.
Pine needles, diamond laden.
Above, a rainbow.
Sunny and stormy:
The devil’s beating his wife.
No mowing today!
   
Some big, some little:
Muddy footprints on the floor.
Mud’s not just for kids.
Torrential downpour.
Weather loved only by ducks.
And I, with my book.

I should also note that ‘diamond’ in my particular dialect (i.e., Southern English) is two syllables, not three. So there are not eight syllables in the second haiku down in the first column. :)


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Gary Henderson is an amateur author who lives in the Greater Atlanta Metropolitan Area with a chef housemate. By day he is a mild-mannered software developer working for a major health-care company. By night and on weekends, he occasionally creates and destroys worlds.

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