heat – – haiku

6 thoughts on “heat – – haiku”

1. The Japanese would simply have written: “the heat!”. There are reams and reams of haiku that start with that kigo. I get the impression their winters were fairly mild (by New England standards), and their summer’s could be blistering. They seldom complained about the cold the way they complained about that heat, at least among the haiku I’ve read.

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   1. Food for thought…thank you I think I may revise it to ‘summer heat’ and make that the first line…maybe

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      1. By the way, I was just sharing, not suggesting you should change it. I make it a policy, these days, to not to make suggestions unless asked by the poet. 🙂

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      2. Yes that was my agenda not yours. Your comment interested me. I sometimes have an urge to revise when I revisit my haiku…there must have been a reason for the preposition ‘of’ in the first place but then I realized the more compact ‘summer heat’ was sufficient.

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      3. I agree. Removing “of” definitely improved it. For the record, I very often go back and tweak my haiku after posting them, often more than once. (I consider everything I post to be rough drafts.) And often it’s to remove words and simplify. For instance, when I first posted my July 11th haiku, I wrote:

         after
         mowing—a snake moves quietly over the crackling
         grasses

         Then decided that “moves” was redundant:

         after
         mowing—a snake quietly over the crackling
         grasses

         I greatly value simplicity and economy of language in haiku.

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      4. I am always amazed how words can be eliminated…sometimes better and sometimes not. I sort of missed the verb in your second version, but then I concluded the poem gained subtlety because I could see two images: a snake slithering away from a destroyed place of shade or a dead snake killed by the mower lying over the grass…having no verb made it open to the reader to choose one.

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