Dabbling with Haiku

At school we are encouraged to do some cross-curricular planning as a team, so this quarter we planned a mini-unit based on the Olympics and implemented it in conjunction with the 2010 Winter Olympics. In English/Language Arts my students have learned and experimented with poetic devices and forms since January--scheduled into these past weeks mostly because the art and literature point of contact at my school asked me to provide student poetry submissions for this year's magazine of student work and meeting a March 1 deadline. (She knew I liked poetry, incorporated student writing of poetry into my curriculum, and none of the other language arts teachers would accept the invitation to provide any.) So, in an attempt to clump and streamline expectations, I offered to do the culminating activity for my team's interdisciplinary unit: Write a poem with an Olympics connection--mathematical, scientific, historical, and/or current events and viewing experience. We begin in class tomorrow...despite the fact that the Olympics in real time will still be in progress!

Because we (my students and I) may be approaching a poetry-sated state and "short" always appeals and we live in Japan, I decided we would write Haiku! Then, this weekend while reviewing my Haiku file--hard-copy and digital--I uncovered Haiku I wrote along with students several years ago when I taught a quarter-long creative writing class. They exist only on a piece of paper, so now I will self-publish, and there will be a digital record as well.

[Disclaimer: I do a lot of my personal writing under the influence of melancholy.]

low, gray clouds lumber
across a winter landscape
and trees wear black lace


dark and bittersweet
your chocolate breath carries
no promise but now


the rain beats against
anguished memory and drains
away your image


time is a traitor,
stealing the ache, betraying
everlasting passion


summer's memory
stirs November shadows like
marshes salted with sea