Here are 3 versions of the haiku poem I posted last week. No need to read the original post. Just pick one of the 3 here 🙂
#1
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
hands catch the hot ash
#2
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
the ash they leave us
#3
what dreams may come
A million falling stars
at once, like angels they light
the sky against darkness, but some
thing is wrong. Unlike angels they burn.
Open your hands. You can already
feel, maybe taste,
the hot ash.
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#1 as a haiku since it has the 17 syllables, but I love #3 overall even though it doesn’t follow the “rules.”
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Thanks, Bonnie! That’s what I need to know. Fyi: I’m a faithful follower of the Chicago Manual of Style in this regard. I don’t have it handy, but I know that they had a list of traditional rules, and the last one in the list was this: “Break a rule if it doesn’t work” — a great guideline for life as well as for writing!
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I agree. Your third poem proves that breaking the rules can be awesome!
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Thanks, Bonnie. Actually, I wasn’t thinking of the 3rd poem as a rule-breaking haiku but just as an imagist poem alternative. But your comments are gratifying to my inner, anti-Establishment rebel. I’m going to start reading it your way! 🙂
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Only #1.
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I like your confidence, Annie. I will count you twice!
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I’m all about #2. A solid haiku will have an ending line that is intriguing and leaves the reader thinking about how the parts come together.
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Thanks Stephen. Well-argued. And you make me feel justified in posing the question, since you have completed the circle — my first three votes were for #3, #1, and #2, respectively 🙂
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The bottom line is you’re the writer, the poet. And the words and structure and the emotions are yours to share as you wish. If rules weren’t meant to be broken, modernized, and experimented with, we’d still be seeing cave drawings as high art.
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And one of the nice things about experimenting and sharing — my poems, at least when they work, pull out a range of emotions well beyond my own. I was recently a guest on an online book club for one of my novels, and I swear I learned more about the hidden strata of my novel from them than they did from me 🙂
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I vote for #1, but I’d remove the “the” from the last line: the THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP effect seems just right. Of course that leaves us one syllable short. Perhaps “hands cupped catch hot ash”? – “c h c h” thumps and then relief with the soft tones of “ash” that carry on for a second.
But the first two lines seem weak to me, because they’re just ordinary, almost trite, although they do the job of setting up the reader to understand the third line.
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
cupped hands catch hot ash
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Wow! You’re good, Terence! Usually I see + and – to changes, whether proposed by me or someone else. In this case, I’m with you 100% on the last line. The change is made in my master copy. Thx!
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#1
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Thanks, Ken. Duly weighed.
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#3, it appeals to more senses, and I also didn’t get the sense of something wrong from 1 or 2, just something transient. So if that was an impression you wanted to give, definitely #3.
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Hi Kate. I didn’t have a preset impression I was trying to give — just playing with each to see what worked, each in its own right. I’ll still put you down for #3 🙂 Gary
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#1
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Thanks, Nessa. The votes were spread around to all 3, but #1 is now pulling ahead. Btw, I now prefer the variant on #1 proposed by Terence in the comments. What do you think?
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
cupped hands catch hot ash
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Hands catch white hot ash
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Wow! I’m getting too many goodies to choose from !! 🙂 For now, it’s a tie between yours and Terence’s. I have to think about it. Maybe I”ll do another poll with just your two variants 🙂
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I really like the #1 and the #3 one….the first one seems like the words you are actually writing down on paper and the last one displays what is actually going on inside one’s mind!
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I like #1 🙂
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Thanks!
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