Anonymous
tsumo mo oshi
I regret picking
and not picking
violets.
Haiku is great, but not the way we teach it to school kids. Sure, I'm all for helping them appreciate poetry, and haiku are short, easy to understand and fun to do. For that matter, a friend and I wrote what we like to pretend is the first three-word haiku.
On the Uses of Rational Thought
Philosophical
Intelligibility.
Anticlimactic.
But here's the thing - that's not a haiku! Sure, it follows the rules: three lines, seventeen syllables. But to define haiku by rules is to kill it.
Haiku is not an exercise in counting syllables, it's a poem that's all point and no middle. It's usually got natural themes and specific settings. There's lots of dualism, ambiguity and room for interpretation. It's got what an old Buddhist adage calls "the stink of Zen."
And teaching kids that the best way to write a poem is by counting... Well that just ain't right.
Here's another one that seems to have a lot of what actually makes a poem haiku.
Yagi Shokyu-ni
yakeshi no no
Violets have grown here and there
on the ruins of my burned house.
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