The Haiku Challenge

Life’s been a bit hectic of late. And blogging finds itself slipping down the list of priorities. Looking in my notebook I see that I haven’t written many poems over the last few weeks. I’ve been mainly sorting and editing – primarily for a new book of children’s poems due out next year sometime. Whilst doing that I noticed I’ve written a lot of haikus over the last couple of years. So I thought I might include a few here. Meanwhile – if you feel inspired to write a haiku of your own - seventeen syllables arranged 5, 7, 5 - be my guest.

Mirror Haiku

Look in the mirror
What do you see, pussy cat?
I see a lion.

Wind Haiku

The wind shakes the school
Like the beat of a dragon’s wing
On a dark night

Seaside Haiku

Five crows sit on the beach
Seven seagulls skim the surf
Five crabs set a trap

Long Word Haiku

What's the meaning of
Antidisestablishmentarianism?

Crow Haiku

one, two, three, four, five
accumulating darkness
crow keeps his counsel

Tension Haiku

There is a tension
As bees and beetles struggle
On the pool’s surface

Death Cycle Haiku

Rushing down the hill
A bicycle.
A beetle
Fails to cross the road

Sit Dog Haiku

Sit, sit, sit dog, sit
Good boy, sit, go on, sit, sit
Sit, sit, sit, sit,

Please…

Haiku Fest

If I read just one
more haiku I swear I’ll go
nuts

Too Many Books

I have too many books
Read once and shelved
Or piled up by my bed
Arriving daily in the post
Unlikely to be read

Too many poems
Wait between the covers
For their exercise
Or stacked in Plato’s cave
Like unsettled similes

Too many facts and fictions
Characters adrift on sandbanks
Children starved of attention
An old man glimpsed upon the pier
And then - no further mention

I glance at the book review
As I'm jotting down these words
And a neglected poet catches my eye
It’s another book to join the queue
Another book I’ll have to buy

Examination Piece

First tell me what I, the poet, need to find
before I decide
which of the two roads I must take.

Blue in line four
seems an odd choice of adjective.
Do you agree?
Which colour would you choose?

Have you ever metaphorically
Found yourself
In a similar poem?

How does this poem handle simile and rhyme?
And finally

How do you think this poem
will add to your enjoyment of poetry
as you enter adulthood?
A lot.
Not a lot.
Not at all.

Thank you for your time.

Love Poems

The Sweetest Song

The sweetest song
I ever heard
Was written just for you
The clearest stream
The widest word
The closest true of true

Of all the things
That dance and sing
Expressed in we and two
Let’s leap and laugh
And scatter them
Into our blue of blue

The Scale of My Love

On a scale of one to nine
I love you twenty three
On a scale of grass to dandelion
I love you tree
On a scale of drip to puddle
I love you sea
My love for you is off the dial
You weigh the world to me

On a scale of nudge to bump
I love you ricochet
On a scale of sigh to smile
I love you hip hooray
On a scale of each second lived
I love you every day
On a scale of here to there
I love you all the way

Access All Areas

She had a tag
Around her neck
It said

Mad person
In love
May be found
Wandering
Apparently aimlessly
In restricted areas

Please
Make allowances

Making a Poem

If you say
something
and make it rhyme
that’s
not
necessarily
a poem,
okay?

But
a kiss
always
is

Cows and Horses

It was like this –
Around a million years ago
Mad Mork was ambling home
Cutting through a field of wild cows
And feeling weary
When he had a brainwave
And climbed on the back of a cow.
He rode it home
And everyone in his village said –
Hey, that’s one wild idea.
And soon
Everyone rode the wild cows

It was like this –
Around a million years ago
Sarah had a baby but had no milk
And her friends, also with young babies,
Shared their milk with Sarah’s baby
Sarah was walking with her baby
Past some horses
And noticed a mother feeding her foal
And thought – it’s a crazy idea but it might just work
And she gave her baby some horse’s milk

And so that’s why
Horseboys ride cows
And who doesn’t love
A delicious horse milkshake?

2006

In the grey sky above Vlissengen
A bird floats by
Chased by her own shadow
And the first flakes of snow

On the radio the top two thousand
Ploughs gamely on
And the New Year waits impatiently
On the corner of a scuddy snowy street

The wind is horizontal
Stinging snow and a rock and roll wind
Blows Jill’s brolly apart

The first thunderclaps and sonic booms
Rattle the Dutch rafters and chimneys
And birds head for the country

Midnight and we raise our glass, whoop
Troop outside to witness the carnage of the old year
As the aerial bombardment begins in earnest
With screaming devils and heavy-duty explosives
And Jill says,
We were so young when we met
We’re so old now

Christmas Eve 2005

I wonder what I’ll do tomorrow that’s out of the ordinary?

For murdering the English language and his profligate use of useless adjectives, the anti hero of this poem receives the long sentence he deserves

My favourite Christmas morning breakfast is home-cooked ham on bread and butter.

We are spending the New Year in Vlissengen, in the Netherlands. It’s where Jill and I fell in love, in a little attic room in the house of Annemarie and Hans. They’re selling up and moving to Italy and so this will be our last visit.

(haiku)
one, two, three, four, five
accumulating darkness
crow keeps his counsel

They found Santa dead in the back garden, a gun lay close by.
They are rounding up the usual suspects

As I write this, the watercolour sun sets
in an orange sky
behind the scribble of hedge
and the spilt water of bank

My favourite ever Christmas present was my first guitar.

I haven’t written a song for Jill this year
But I have composed a symphony for her
in my head

A frosty morning
In the corner of the council tip
is a huge blue cage
chocabloc with broken TVs, computers, laptops, monitors, maybe there are a thousand carcasses there, bashed, splintered, split, crushed, cracked, dead
their ghosts sucked back
into the ether
Frank blows into his gloved hands
It’s cold enough for snow, he says

Despite Christmas being for children I enjoy it too
How about you?

I saw my granddaughter in her first Christmas play
She was an angel

How rare to end a sentence with an empty stop

If Life Was Real

If your life was on celluloid
What film would you be in?
If your life was a song
How would your chorus begin?
If your life was laid out on a plate
In the best restaurant in town
What first course would you choose?
And if you woke alone
In the empty hours
And couldn’t sleep
Would you turn on the TV
Or listen to jazz on the radio
Or pick up your guitar
And quietly sing the blues?

Please also leave comments for the Tony Meehan poem here.