You may, or may not, know what a haiku is. I can’t say I had come across them until my son  had to compose a haiku for his homework some years ago. With the on-line help of Wikipedia, I soon found out how a haiku should be written, and rising to the challenge, we had some great fun composing a few verses together.

If you haven’t come across a haiku before, it is a traditional form of Japanese poetry and consists of 3 lines per verse. The first and last lines of a haiku have 5 syllables and the second, or middle line, has 7 syllables. The lines rarely rhyme. You can have as many, or as few verses as you like. Strictly speaking, haiku don’t have titles but I have taken the liberty of assigning titles to mine which gives the reader at least an idea of what’s coming. I had forgotten about haiku until I recently read a funny post on the internet.

 It read;

Haiku are great fun (5)
But they often don’t make sense (7)
Refrigerator (5)

This tickled my sense of humour and so began my re-born enthusiasm for haiku. I like haiku because it provides a structure. 5-7-5. But you then have to draw upon your grasp of meaning and depth of vocabulary to create meaningful but technically correct verse. It is a challenge but very rewarding and children often enjoy this exercise.

Have fun with haiku.