three lines

A few years back, a good friend invited me to an online haiku group. It was simply a shared google doc we accessed daily or whenever we could and we posted a haiku. When I first joined the, it was very active, with many people posting daily. These were friends and family of a close friend so I sort of knew some of them or at least had heard stories of them.

It was an interesting way to communicate. We’d leave each other reaction notes for particularily good ones but mostly we just wrote poems and sometimes reacted to the poems of others either in style or as a conversation. There were funny ones and moving ones. There was a birthday with well wishes written in verse.

Like all communities, it had a rhythm and cast of characters, some posted daily and some only occasionally.

One poet had a dislike of owls and we wrote haiku back and forth, I wrote in defense of the owl.

For a couple of months, I was writing daily haiku and realized how much I enjoyed the form.

The group thinned and thinned until one day, nobody was there. A few people came back once or twice and I remember going back a week or two later to the emptiness of that white page with only an old poem.

It was a strange place to be. An empty, digital space. I’m sure I’d been in a place like that before, one where I was the sole occupent in a game lobby or the only person in an online forum but this felt more like finding out your old favorite coffeehouse had closed, a real void. We communicated in poetry and I’m glad I was part of it. It reignited my love of poetry and words. I also study tanka and find that both are useful for different kinds of vignettes or stories.

Here are some selections from those haiku days. These don’t follow traditional form but for the lines/syllables.

I love the idea of spurring interest in a story in just three lines:

Yarn caught on your shoe
I followed you through the woods
did you see the leaves?

The ability to paint a scene in a haiku is interesting. In three lines we can make something intriguing. I know poetry can teach us to be more precise, I think its brevity can make us better communicators:

Birds suspended down
soil’s on fire grass glows brown
nothing not a sound

Then we have a bit of autobiographical work:

The jacket

I was sure I’s him
Eddie Vedder in my
thrift courdouroy

I think about this one from time to time:

Unraveled again
gravity is on and off
coordinate me

Another glimpse into a tale:

Ghosts greet me at dawn /
Follow me down the dirt path /
We’re never alone

And funny and informative:

Fine and sharper than
Lego, 3D printed support
Tiny foot daggers

Thanks for visiting and please check out my short horror story RATTLESNAKE RODEO!

Until next time, be safe out there in this mad mad world

T