Hot summer haiku

We’ve been experiencing a heat wave here in Vancouver, which has left everyone in my house (people, dog and cats) lying around sweating (or panting), unable to move or think. Today, the temperature has dropped just enough to give us a bit of a reprieve and allow me to stay for more than a few minutes in my sauna of an office as well as muster up enough energy to record some of the haiku that emerged out of the heat.

First, here’s one I wrote back in early June:

early summer heat
unwelcome guest in our house
the dog pants all night

 

And during this week’s  heat:

so many windows
open in the summer heat
spilling people’s lives

 

empty yellow grass
splashed by blue-winged Steller’s jay
beak full of peanut

 

heavy summer heat
no breeze through open windows
the night train’s whistle

 

fat slice of orange moon
behind smog and forest fire smoke
terrible beauty

 

And here’s the surrealistically orange sunset from the night the heat wave started:

Twitter and haiku

I seem to be devoting more time to tweeting than to blogging lately. Perhaps because it’s so quick and easy to tweet, and so far (still novel) I’m finding it fun and challenging to put as much as possible in as few words as possible (kind of like haiku). In fact, one of the appeals of Twitter is that tweets are the perfect size for haiku, as many haiku addicts have discovered. Hashtags like #haiku and #haikuchallenge also enable people to share haiku and challenge eachother to create haiku on specific topics (somewhat kindred to the original Japanese tradition of haiku as socially created linked verse).  Here are some Twitter haiku samples:

Note: reading from the bottom up, the first challenge was to write a haiku using the words 1. crow 2. hole 3. roof, while the second challenge was to use the word “wolfish.” Fun, I thought (the Internet once again distracting me from work on my novel). Btw, my Twitter moniker: Jacquieink