Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Midnight Haiku

For around five years, I posted a haiku every night at midnight.

I like the constraint of the seventeen syllables of the classic ‘haiku in English’, exploring brevity to capture multiple layers of meaning. I like the discipline of writing at least one poem a day… for a poem demands engagement from a different part of the mind than a factual or opinion piece, even though a poem may be both. And I like the personal challenge I set myself most days, of dredging up a random photo from the tens of thousands on my computer and writing the haiku about that photo without argument.

I do rather miss writing them now. So, instead, I put a year’s worth of them into a book. It was curious to see how they worked together, running into each other and illuminating the ideas each poem held.