What do you bring home from your summer outings? Postcards or mugs? Photos or sketches? Leaves to press and stories to tell?
This year I’ve been challenging myself with something unusual (for me). I’ve been bringing home haiku.
Bear with me: I’m no poet. But I find those three short lines make the haiku form feel a little more accessible. Perhaps I find comfort in the constraints.
The three short lines of the haiku also feel short enough that I can hold them in my head as I walk, cycle, or drive. So, as I’ve gone places this almost-summer so far, I’ve been playing around in my head with describing some experiences using the five-seven-five syllable pattern. When I get a moment, I jot down that haiku draft. Then when I get home, I write some reflective prose around the haiku to create haibun (a poetry form that combines haiku with prose).
It feels like a fun way to practice and learn, so I’m sharing a few of those experiments in this “Summer Quartet” blog series. Enjoy! Or, if you don’t enjoy, all the better: you could try your own hand at a summertime haiku and see if you come up with something you like more. 😉
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The Pull of Needful Things
Long days and sunshine bring out crowds. In a park near the dam, people range across the grass and sand, walking dogs, throwing frisbees, catching turtles. Honeybees dart through the air, leaving either cute little pollen-yellow dots or not-cute stingers on arms that get in the way of their work. Drawn by the roar, a few watchers stand at a chain-link fence to behold water rushing over the dam’s crest. It’s simple. And it’s not. Creatures feel the pull of needful things.
All day turtles press
together on stones just to
feel sun on their backs.
Callie J. Smith 