Taking my cue from the “Poetry in Action” feature earlier this month in the New York Times, I decided to include here the actual document/draft of today’s haiku.  (Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets.)  Actually, I’ve written all of these haikus on these same circular pieces of note paper.  You can see how I made changes and revisions while writing the poem.  One result I was really pleased with was the pronoun “one,” which can refer back to either the “phrase” or the “history book” in the second line.

9

“Half a century.”

Phrase from a history book,

one that speaks my age.

Stay tuned for a new haiku each day (or evening)…

Doctor Don

——————–

…a haiku series from my last month as a first-year quinquagenarian.

As with many things in life, this just happened.

I had this grand vision of taking a month-long road trip the year I turned 50 and writing a book about the experience, including thoughts and observations on my life (and life in general) so far.

Well, as John Lennon sang–but didn’t originate–in “Beautiful Boy,” life “is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”  So, no trip and no book (yet).

One night a few weeks ago, I woke up from a recliner nap and boom!  I got an idea.  No rhyme, no reason, it just came to me:  For my last month as a 50-year-old, I would write a haiku each night to capture the experience. 

As the Poetry Foundation reminds us, a haiku is “a Japanese verse form most often composed, in English versions, of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. A haiku often features an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a specific moment in time” [my emphasis].

Each night for one month I will write and post a haiku.  By September 17, the end-result will be a 30-haiku series.  At that time, I’ll (hopefully) be starting a new year and chapter of what I call my “Age of Quinquagenarius.”