It's hard not to like haiku. They're small, they're imagistic, they're quick to read. It's one of the few poetic forms almost everyone knows, because you start writing them in second grade, right before you learn about acrostics and cinquains.
Like many people, I fell in love with haiku with this one:
On the one ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.
- Buson (trans: X. J. Kennedy)
(the syllable count doesn't hold in a lot of translations)
Here's everything a stringently classical haiku should have: juxtaposition, image, hint of season, and a sense of something I think of as movement, but of an internal, emotional kind. The light as air moth, the so-heavy bell, stillness, but the implicit tone of the bell tolling if it were to be rung - how that moth would wake!
Fall, to me, is a haiku season if ever there was one. Everything seems overlaid with metaphor as the year begins its winding down.
Today's string of haiku started with the one I ended up placing last in the sequence - I can still see that leaf, lonely yellow beside all the still-green ones.
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