Peter Galen Massey

Haiku about spring

haiku about summer

haiku about fall

haiku about winter

Haiku about nature and the season are the customary topics for these poems. If you follow the traditional rules, images of nature and the seasons paired with an implicit emotion are the only acceptable elements of haiku.

For various reasons, I don’t follow these rules. Sometimes I present an image from nature and leave out the emotion although you’ll feel a mood. These haiku I think of as closer to landscape painting than poetry. Other times, I’ll make the emotion explicit, make a statement, or use metaphor or other poetic elements that traditional haiku avoid.

What I’m trying to find is a poem that hasn’t been written before. In a real sense, haiku as a poetic form has been perfected and the subject of nature in haiku has been exhausted. I’m not sure you can write a better haiku about winter than the ones already rewritten, for example. I’m also not sure you can write a haiku about winter different from the ones already written.

One point of my work is to try to find a way to write about nature in haiku that is different from other poems already written, however. For the same reason, I’ll write haiku about love and other subjects outside of nature, or try to tell a story in 17 syllables, or look for emotions outside the set standard to poetry.

I don’t want to exclude nature from my work, because the experience of nature is a fundamental element of human experience. Even when you live in a city, the sky and light and weather are always present and nature is present too despite our best efforts to eradicate it. Sometimes nature is there poetically. The raptors that nest in skyscrapers and hunt the canyons between them. Sometimes nature is there unpoetically. The rat gnawing on a pizza slice between the subway tracks. For more thoughts, see my post on how to write haiku.