In these months, as 12 years of Joan’s chronic leukemia move towards their inevitable conclusion, I have found it – as you may imagine – difficult to write poetry of any kind. And yet I feel that it is somehow important for me to try. 

            Something about the sheer sparseness of the haiku formula appealed to me: three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The format leaves no room for maudlin meandering. I wrote about a dozen of them; after consulting with a pair of friends, these four remain. 

tides suck life away

anemones scrunch in pain

rocks rise wet with tears

candle flame gutters

winter winds flay exposed flesh

warm fire waits within

thunderclouds hover

brood along dark horizon

azaleas glow

black pit lurks below

awaits unwary footstep

oh, to fly above

Added thoughts: trying to write haiku has made me realize that they are utterly foreign to the natural rhythms of English composition. Our almost intuitive rhythm in music, poetry, and even children’s play, is four beats to the bar, each beat having either two or three syllables, which leads to an even number of syllables, 8 or 12. If we shift to three beats, as often happens in hymns with an 8-6-8-6 pattern, or into iambic pentameter with five beats to a  line, it still works out to even numbers. 

            But a haiku has no even-beat lines. Even its total of syllables is odd: 17. Over and over, I found I wanted to even things up by adding or subtracting a syllable.