Haiku!

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Blogging's really hard
sorry for the long absence...
nah I'm not sorry.
                                                                                                                       - a haiku, by me.

Hello everyone! After many many months, I'm back!

Today for school I was told to write some haiku and a tanka for english. For those of you who don't know, a tanka is a Japanese style of poem invented over twelve hundred years ago. The Emperor of Japan actually still holds a tanka writing competition to celebrate the new year!

Tanka are short and lyrical poems, traditionally consisting of 31 syllables. In Japanese, tanka follow a pattern of syllables like haiku - 5, 7, 5, 7, 7, 5. A tanka doesn't rhyme, but it makes use of metaphor, similies, and other things.

Here is an example of a tanka, written by Komachi Ono in the mid tenth century AD.

The blossom’s tint is washed away
By heavy showers of rain;
My charms, which once I prized so much,
Are also on the wane,
Both bloomed, alas! in vain.

The much more famouse younger cousin of the tanka, the haiku, was invented only about three hundred years ago. A haiku is made up of seventeen syllables. The three lines in a haiku are the same as the first three lines in a tanka - 5, 7, 5. This had led to competitions to turn haiku into tanka.

Here is an example of a haiku, written by the famouse haiku writer Matsuo Basho.

The old pond;
a frog jumps in —
the sound of the water.

While it doesn't follow the syllable rule in English, it does in Japanese:

Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya,
ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into)
mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound)

So for English I was instructed to write my own tanka and several haiku. It's much more fun than I first thought, and I've written about thirteen haiku and a single tanka. So I thought I'd share some with you:

My Tanka:

Tanks are really dumb
blowing people to the sky!
Tanks kill lots of men,
mostly those writing Tankas!
this is the absolute worst
Tanka ever made.

See? Terrible huh? Now let's look at what I'm really proud of: my haiku!

That tanka was bad
I bet I could do better
than this idiot

Winter is coming
like the last Game of Thrones book
but really coming

Wind is in the trees
moving them this way and that
with a gentle breeze.

Mount Fuji stands tall
many a man looks up it
no one sees the top!

It is getting cold
but we don't make a fire
for some dumb reason.

To cold to go out
to hot to make a fire
Jack frost is plastered.

Sister steals my haiku
like a racoon in the night
this is an outrage!

My great masterpiece
what should this be about?
Oh crap out of time.

So what did you think of my haiku? Some of them are lamentations about the comings and goings during winter time (which it is here as I am writing this), others are about nature. One is about Ralraymee's promise to steal my haiku if I didn't write them on here, and a few are just meant to be funny.

Anyways. I gotta go now. I'll see you later (probably)

Sayonara!

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