Peter Galen Massey

Haiku Poems about Hope

here there is no thirst / from the stone the water flows / inexhaustible

through the cold branches / in a far corner of sky / a single star shines

i tend my garden / as a meditation. hope / in a broken world

 

Haiku Poems about Music

no theory no word / no intent. i was taken / by the song alone

lost inside this song / i am as wide and weightless / as the summer sky

the rising music / promises even weary / souls can fly away

i heard no music / until the music was you / all love songs are true

 

Haiku Poems about Grief

at a certain age / every goodbye starts to be / practice for the last

unseen and unknown / behind every face and door / what black worlds of pain

feel her weight heavy / for the earth. this is a task / of the working day

this yearning for you / fills my sails, longer than years / wider than the sea

 

Haiku Poems about Joy

joy is a bubble / a shimmering rainbow world / lighter than the air

let your laughter rise / through the velvet evening sky / and delight the moon

the ocean is wide / and my green heart close, caught in / the wonder of time

we are made of time / and stardust. joy is what stays / after grief has gone

 

Haiku Poems about the City

in the grand station / the undulating echoes / an ocean of sound

what news, what cruel words / from the remorseless screen made / the young woman weep

blank masks of boredom / the metal cars jerk and screech / close heat, tang of sweat

see her painted face / a pantomime of beauty / parody of youth

alone in the booth / he sits over cold coffee / and stares at the road

on the steel blue glass / a hushed jet slips and shivers / the city dreaming

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Haiku Poem Videos

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This video collects some of my favorite haiku about love, yearning, loss, hope, and endurance. It features the song “Drifting By” written and performed by Pineapple Hat, which is used with the permission of the artists.

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This video collects haiku about rage, despair, darkness, and death. It features the song “I Forgot to Water My Potted Plant… Yay!” written and performed by Pineapple Hat, which is used with the permission of the artists.

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Notes on These Haiku Poems

The three line, 5-7-5 syllable structure of classic haiku in English approximates the three lines and seventeen mora of haiku in Japanese. The equivalence is not exact because a mora is a unit of sound, and it is common in English for one syllable to contain two mora. Diphthongs, which have two vowel sounds in a single syllable, are an example.

I follow this three line, 5-7-5 format when I write haiku. I often find it useful to divide the poem in two and place a break at the end of a line, as haiku that follow the rules do. I like breaking a poem in the middle of the line too, as this haiku does to place the emphasis on the word “hope”:

i tend my garden
as a meditation. hope
in a broken world

Breaking the poem into two parts isn’t the only solution to the haiku format. Another solution is to make a single statement, which you can organize into clean phrases or use enjambment to jump across the lines like this:

the rising music
promises even weary
souls can fly away

In this haiku, much of its effect comes from wanting the words “music” and “promises” and “weary” and “souls” to sit in the same lines. The enjambment creates a feeling of motion and flight. The break between “weary” from “souls” is particularly important to this effect.

This analysis leads to an interesting question. If I don’t follow the constraints of the 5-7-5 format, do we get a better poem?

the rising music promises
even weary souls
can fly away

I’m not sure this version is better but it has a different feeling: stillness, calm, and certainty rather than the feeling of motion. This poem is an example of how the haiku format, like any poetic format, influences the results.

Finally, three equal lines – independent but interrelated – are a solution to the 5-7-5 syllable count, like this haiku about winter:

a low stone grey sky
the cold heavy on our bones
faint lights in the dusk

This is my favorite solution because I find these haiku the most difficult to write and because they yield results closer to painting or photography than poetry. There’s no meaning in this haiku, but rather space for the reader to decide the message of the poem for herself. There is image, mood, and feeling. A portrait of a moment of consciousness without comment.

This leads me to a related topic. One of the requirements of traditional haiku is that the meaning is implied not stated. Meaning should be there but it should sit in the tantalizing distance, a dazzling insight or deeper feeling waiting to be discovered by the reader, if she is clever enough.

I think this is the result of restricting haiku to the subject of nature, which offers us beauty, mystery, wonder, awe, and terror but no information about its meaning or purpose. Nature is a fact. It expresses no opinion on why it exists. And haiku about nature, respecting their subject, should express no opinion either.

Clearly, I don’t follow this rule, which is one of the reasons it’s fair to describe my work as modern haiku. I don’t follow the rules so much from stubborn contrariness (although doubtlessly there is some of that too) but from the desire to write a poem that hasn’t been written before. Which means I often prefer to make direct statements in my haiku or no statement at all.

This is also the effect of expanding my subject beyond nature to human experience. The mountains may not have opinions but we do, and we can keep ourselves very busy expressing them, which is why I’ve written haiku about love and haiku about death. This also explains the tension in much of my work. The quiet acceptance you find in traditional haiku is a kind of wisdom. Fool that I am, I’m still banging on the door of consciousness, demanding answers, demanding whatever is behind that door to open up.

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Haiku FAQs

What Are the Rules of Haiku?

The classic form of haiku in English has strict rules governing its structure, syllable count, topics, themes, and tone. These rules include:

• 3 lines, 17 syllables. The traditional haiku format in English has three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, and five syllables in the third.
• Alive to a moment in the natural world. Classic haiku capture the essence of a moment in time, typically set in nature. The use of a seasonal word (“kigo” in Japanese) or seasonal reference can reinforce the themes of time and nature.
• Images, implied emotions, and unspoken meanings. Haiku often use images to create impressions and feelings. Direct statements of the poem’s ideas, themes, and meaning are avoided.
• A relationship between two elements. Haiku frequently use the juxtaposition of two elements, and especially two images, to achieve its effects. These elements break the poem into two parts. In Japanese, this break is often achieved using a kireji or “cutting word.” In English, poets can use em dashes, ellipses, or line breaks.
• No rhyming or other poetic devices. Haiku should be written in simple, clear language without rhyme, meter, metaphors, symbols, or other literary techniques.

Modern haiku in English can bend or break all these rules. Ezra Pound’s 1913 poem “In a Station of the Metro”, which is often considered the first haiku in English, breaks many of them.

Probably the only rules you can’t break and still have your poem considered a haiku are the ones concerning its brevity: the number of lines and the number of syllables. You don’t have to conform to the three line, 5-7-5 syllable format to call your poem a haiku, but you do have to stay somewhere in their vicinity.

Push your poem to five lines and you’ve left the realm of haiku and entered the realm of tanka. Go beyond five lines and your flirting with short free verse. I don’t have a problem with poets breaking any rule of haiku they want (god knows, I break most of them most of the time) but you do have to follow some of the rules somewhat to use the word haiku to describe your work.

Are Haiku Easy to Write?

Haiku are the easiest and hardest poems to write in English. They are particularly easy to write if you ignore the 5-7-5 syllable format and just write a poem with three short lines. Their brevity, traditional focus on nature, and emphasis on images, impressions, and associations make haiku simple to write as well.

Haiku also benefit from apophenia, which is “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The rules that limit classic haiku to implied emotions and unspoken feelings help poets fill their haiku with suggested meanings without necessarily needing to know what those meanings are. In this way, haiku are like nature, which feels full of importance but offers no information about what that importance might be.

Because they are easy to write, haiku are frequently included in school lesson plans and are particularly susceptible to composition by artificial intelligence programs, which can instantaneously generate mediocre poetic slop in tremendous volume.

All the elements that make haiku easy to write also make them hard to write – if your intention is to write a poem that is new and good.

The traditional rules of haiku are so restrictive that they leave the form both perfected and exhausted. Famous poets like Basho and Issa were so successful that when you try to compose a classic haiku, you often end up writing an inferior version of a poem that already exists.

Restricting your poems to observations of the natural world have a similar difficulty. People have been watching sunrises and sunsets and sunlight and moonlight and mountains and oceans and rain and mist and all sorts of weather and wild flowers dancing in breezes and birds chirping in trees and puppies frolicking on lawns (you get the point) for a long long long long time, and it’s really hard to write a haiku about nature that twenty other people aren’t also writing right now. Unless you write something so bad no one else would think to do it, which is its own kind of problem.

Haiku are also hard to write if you follow the 5-7-5 syllable format. This restriction makes writing haiku a difficult technical challenge, similar to trying to find an elegant solution to a challenging chess problem. The 5-7-5 rule is arbitrary and unnecessary and can easily be ignored unless you’re me – in which case you obsessively follow it for reasons that you can’t explain. Really, go ahead and write a 4-6-5 haiku if you want. It won’t hurt anyone.

Should You Use Punctuation in Haiku?

Punctuation is mostly unnecessary in haiku because the structure and briefness of the poem replaces punctuation’s function, which is to make writing more understandable.

For example, a period is used to mark the end of a sentence and separate its thoughts from the thoughts that follow. In haiku, this function is performed by the line breaks. You don’t need a period at the end of the first or second lines, if these are complete thoughts, because the sense of the words and line break does the work. You especially don’t need a period at the end of the third line because the poem has clearly come to an end.

Using a comma or period within a line makes sense, because punctuation here does make the writing more understandable. Similarly, if your replacement for traditional haiku’s cutting word falls in the middle of a line, marking this break with an em dash or ellipsis makes sense.

But for the most part, punctuation in haiku introduces the rigidity of the school teacher with his ruler or the fussiness of the copyeditor with her red pencil to the feeling of the work and diminishes it as a result. Question marks can be implied by the phrasing of the words. Exclamation points are trying too hard or are an admission of failure (although I’ll give translators of Basho’s “The Old Pond” their “Splash!”). Colons and semi-colons are pompous and pretentious unless you mean them as a joke, in which case I’ll laugh with you.

Capitalizing the first word of each line of a haiku is similarly unnecessary. The line has clearly begun and your eye does not need a visual clue to help you read it. Capitalizing proper nouns has a different effect. It gives more weight and emphasis to the word than it deserves, particularly when you capitalize the word “i” and let it loom in its egotism and self-importance over the rest of the poem. A haiku is a democracy and all its words are citizens with equal rights.

Updated 27 July 2025