Haikus

Haikus are little poems which paint a picture in words. They originated in Japan.

They have a fixed pattern:

· they have a total of 17 syllables;

· they have only three lines:

· In the first line there are five syllables

· In the second there are seven syllables

· In the third there are, again, five syllables.

Remember

Syllables are parts of words.

Some words have only one syllable: house /cat /school

Some words have several syllables:

‘Astronaut ’has three syllables: ‘AS –TRO –NAUT

‘Apple ’has two syllables: ‘A –PPLE

‘Rhinoceros ’has four syllables: ‘RHI –NOC –ER –OS

Here are three examples of haikus, all based on animals:

Snails

Snails, spooled under leaves:

tiny tape-measures dreaming

succulent inches.

Geoffrey Holloway

Tiger

Tiger, eyes dark with

half-remembered forest night,

stalks an empty cage.

Judith Nicholls

Wolf

still on his lone rock

stares at the uncaged stars and

cries into the night

Judith Nicholls

Write two haikus about different animals.

Good haikus create a mood or an atmosphere. If you look again at Tiger ,what kind of

mood does it create? What mood might a haiku about a horse or a wild animal

in a zoo create? See if you can create different atmospheres in your poems.