summer sea
a resort town fills
with foriegn tongues
I work in a resort town. On the street at this time of year you are surrounded by people from all over the world. They were speaking many languages around me as I ordered coffee at Starbucks. another clue about tourists, they are usually dressed better than locals. ;)
Do you have a summer haiku?
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Comments: 11
There's a lot of subjects in your haiku. Five of them, each engaged in a seperate thing. If you can pare it down to a couple images that interact, it will be easier to see which subject is the star of the show.
waves crash-
throwing stones
in the empty sea
sleepless summer night-
someone's barking dog bites off
pieces of the stars
summer sea-
blending their voices
seagulls and children
for instance. This kind of construction gives you that "break" that is so much a part of haiku. The splitting of the poem into two distinct sections. I have an article on this aspect somewhere back along the dusty trail. it might be called fragment and phrase.
in Basho's famous haiku:
old pond---
a frog jumps in
the water sound
"old pond" is the fragment, "a frog jumps in the water sound" is the phrase. Hear the pause?
Japanese use a "cutting word" to divide the haiku into a setting and subject. English speakers use a fragment that sits off by itself but is connected by contrast or parallel with the phrase portion. Usually there is some punctuation after the fragment. A colon or dash typically.
winter boardwalk
ghosts of summer screams
haunt the roller coaster
sand in the whitewater
grinds a lens
You know, I had an uncle who was an optician, god rest his soul. He fell into a lens grinder, made a spectacle of himself. Shame.