Haiku

My son gave me Basho's Complete Haiku and Higginson's Haiku Handbook for Christmas and birthday, both excellent reads. The best haiku a pupil wrote for me, years ago, was a riddle:

formed by falling snow/it drifts towards the dark sea/a silver ribbon (a river or stream)

This keeps to the traditional (but now often ignored) 5-7-5 syllable structure and makes the once obligatory seasonal reference. It also avoids repetition of any complete syllable sound. I now have a seven-foot icicle stretching from a drainpipe to the roof of the front porch, so thought I would attempt a traditional-form haiku:

do not threaten me/beautiful ice-sword/you will soon be gone

A haiku master would write perhaps a thousand in his life, of which a dozen might be highly regarded, so maybe I need to do more work on this. I find it remarkable that when Basho was at the height of his powers and output in the second half of the 17th century, Milton was writing Paradise Lost.

Last year I devised a Cornish verse form, the bezant, and will post a few next time.