first one

Haiku – First One

One of the lessons I frequently gave children was how to write a haiku. There’s many children (I think maybe many people, but I’m not here to make that vast a sweeping statement) for whom writing is really difficult, and constraints (such as most poetry has) can support them and focus their work. So I give lots of poetry lessons, and you can’t get much lower stakes than seventeen syllables, so I often start there. (If they need something even lower stakes, it’s acrostic poetry, FYI). I explain the rules and then we write.

And every one of the dozens of times I have given this lesson, I have had to write a haiku. Because you model it, right?

I am going to start posting those haiku here when I come across them because why not?

The leaves rise and dance

pushed all around by the wind

trampled as I pass.

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