the third line turn

Haiku – Second one

A commonality of these haiku is that they’re often about autumn. It seems I have frequently given this lesson in October or November, and reached for the nature right in front of me to make my example for the students.

Scuff, scuff, scuff my feet

kicking up brown crackly leaves

just dropped overnight.

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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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