Two minutes on Haiku…

white sun stings the eye

black swallow soars hunter high

flat to ground I fly

I don’t know whether a Haiku should rhyme or not, I’m told that it shouldn’t but then I’ve also always been told that a Haiku should be composed of three lines, the first having five syllables, the second seven, and the third and final line five…

on my back beneath

black swallow soars hunter high

surrounded in light

The word Haiku comes from the Japanese meaning ‘Light Verse.’ In Japanese Haiku are written in a single vertical line, so not three lines at all, and using seventeen sound units or mora which I’m told aren’t the same as syllables, although quite what they are though seems hard to define…

above me a bird catches light on the wing as my eye follows

You’ll have to imagine the above in vertical. To make it even more complicated English is a stressed language (no wonder with all these Haiku complications), and ideas can simply be expressed with just a short line, followed by a long line, and then another short line – so no need for syllable, mora, verticals, or unit counts at all…

laid down beneath

black swallow soars his hunting high

and in his eye I fly

Better, but all in all, complicated. But I may just keep working on it, even if it is really easy to make a cheesy Haiku (no, I’m not going to try, although you may think I already have).

After all, how can you go wrong when the masters of the genre had names that sound like the Japanes equivalent of the seven dwarves – Shiki, Buson and Basho, to name but three. So there you have it; Haiku in two minutes – Haiku! (bless me).

Note to myself: Perhaps I’ll call myself Bluto, or was that a different cartoon?