Peter Galen Massey

Haiku about Fall

in the light fresh breeze / a single leaf pirouettes / the air enchanted

on the bare brown branch / a fat squirrel anxiously eats / another acorn

blooming in beauty / beauty when faded and dry / life and death are good

mirror on mirror / the wide waters flowing with / the light of the sky

dusk comes like a bruise / on the windshield, rain sparkles / diamonds and rubies

Haiku about Winter

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

when cold days turn dark / leaf the earth, lemon the sun / steam in summer’s cup

a pen and ink world / beautiful desolation / snow on ohio

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

Haiku about Spring

the first rain of spring / smells like your lover’s body / asleep in your bed

heavy grey, pure white / a drama of changing sky / blinding silver, blue

once in my childhood / all the dandelions bloomed / while i was sleeping

the sun pours herself / into the sea and the world / overflows with light

Haiku about Summer

boom of a deep drum / rain dappling a silver lake / the sky grows brighter

clash of katydids / barefoot on the dew lush grass / the bright watching stars

all of summer lives / in this peach full and sweet. still / sun warm from the tree

that shimmering sea / that blue day when our hearts burned / brighter than the sun

the orange trumpets / bloom like fire, blow summer / a final fanfare

Watch My Haiku Poems Video

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Nature Haiku FAQs

Do Haiku Poems Have to Be About Nature?

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 written, 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 haiku about death 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.

Do Haiku Poems Have to Be About a Season?

Just like haiku do not need to be about nature, they don’t need to reference a season either. However, seasonal references in haiku are powerful because they make the poem by implication a meditation on time, which is as great a theme of our lives. It is time that drive change. It is time that brings us to death.

Young people don’t care much for time. It’s either an impediment to the future that can’t come too soon or a perfect eternal now that will never change. My parents may have grown old. I won’t because I’m smarter! They soon learn differently, as we all did. Then we learn that the eternal now is the only thing that matters, the only thing we have. This moment and now this moment, and making use of them is our work. Haiku are about paying attention to the moment, living in it as fully as we are able, and capturing some essence of our lives that is safe from the destruction of time. We can do this talking about the seasons in haiku. But we can talk about time other ways too.

Do Haiku Poems Have to Use the 5-7-5 Syllable Format?

No, haiku do not need to follow the five-seven-five syllable format. Most haiku poets in English use this form as a guideline. Haiku should have three lines, although you can get away with two. These lines should be short. But the lines do not need to have exactly five or seven syllables. Like most rules in art, follow the ones that serve your work and ignore the rest.

Think of the phase “doing it wrong” as a synonym for the word “creativity.” In the history of art, whenever the rules for a form are well codified and enforced by bean counters with commercial interests or self-appointed elites stuffed with mediocrities, this is a sign that form has been exhausted. Don’t listen to the bean counters and elites. They might help you make money. They might help you gain an academic appointment and the self-interested praise of  colleagues expecting you will praise them back. But they will never help you become an artist.

Updated 23 September 2025.

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