Excuse(s for) my haiku

I learned some Haiku in primary school. Well, I thought I did.

Sometimes thoughts spill out in that syllabic structure hard-wired since childhood. I catch them and string them across notebooks or hang them on my phone. They swing in my mind, little satisfied smiles.

Reading Raphael d’Abdon’s ‘Haiku essentials’ in the IMBIZA journal swiftly wiped the smile.

What a shock to discover that Japanese sound units are closer to 10-14 syllables in English than the 17 (5-7-5) I was told! So few syllables – and so many more rules. Not only was my Haiku ‘too long’, most of it was not Haiku – but Senryu.

Worse, some verses had auxiliary verbs. Some even rhymed.

I had already compiled some of my work into collections – Starting with light and Facing
darkness. Suddenly I was in a twilight zone – squinting at stanzas that were hardly haiku and might not be poems at all.

Unable to distinguish or discard them, I decided to put them aside. I began to explore the form by stumbling through the field of broken rules – and broken poems – in the hope of
arriving at a clearing in my head.

lacking the iq
to write proper haiku . . .
switching to senryu

drawn to renku –
rooted in hokku –
foiled by ego

personification
a sin concealed by
approved punctuation

moving to rhyme
professed a crime unless . . .
unintended

back to nature
swooping gulls squawk
silenced by glass

windswept palms …
alliteration is allowed …
wave frayed fronds

counting sound
units – sunbird’s syllables
interrupt

cloud thickens
pigeons grey on greyer
white-flecked waves

A transition – from Durban to Leicester via haibun (with senryu), I hope:
Gazing into the winter mist, I miss my son. Two seasons and a continent away. He calls, switches to video, shows me his new Japanese teapot, cups and the kilo of hibiscus tea that he has just received from Nigeria.

son carries light
hibiscus in hagi
brewed online