In case you didn’t already know this, here’s a little secret about writing poetry that rhymes: It’s hard. Sometimes I simply can’t come up with the perfect rhyme, even if I use a rhyming dictionary, an extremely useful and valuable book.
Every once in a while I decide to write poetry that doesn’t rhyme. Haiku was invented in Japan and is a special kind of unrhymed poetry. Traditional haiku has three lines. The first line has five syllables, the second line has seven syllables, and the third has five syllables, adding up to a total of seventeen syllables. Haiku is usually written about a single thing or event in nature, such as a cricket, the wind blowing through the grass, or the last leaf on a tree. Many poets writing in English have found that it’s a useful form for expressing insights about ordinary life. It’s also generally written from the poet’s point of view.
When I wrote my book of haiku, I decided to write each poem from the animal’s point of view instead. That means I pretended I was the animal speaking. That’s what I did with the beaver haiku and with all the others in the book.
Pick an animal—it can be a bird, bug, fish, reptile, or mammal—and write a haiku about it. You can write it in the creature’s voice or in your own. Keep looking for ways to make your poem better. The shorter the poem, the more important each word becomes.