Summer Haiku

I'd missed the deadline. 

Too late! My brain ticked over

into haiku mode.

Everybody likes writing haiku. Easy, aren't they? Hello? The question has been raised whether Americans, writing in English, can ever write anything fit to be called haiku. There are rules beyond "count five, seven, five syllables." Syllable counting alone yields lines that have the shape of haiku, but don't qualify as the real thing--as shown above.

Here are the three late summer haiku my brain generated while reading the discussion of what makes a Real Haiku at https://classicalpoets.org/2022/06/29/what-makes-a-good-haiku/#/ .

Although a good haiku stands alone, it may help if you know that butterflies can be classified as pollinators or composters. Some individual butterflies do both jobs. In many species, like the Tiger Swallowtails one of which I watched earlier this summer, the females normally like sweet things, flower nectar and fruit juice, so they mostly pollinate; the males normally like salts, so they mostly dry out oil spills and nastier things. Though the female butterflies need the minerals the males get from these mineral salts, they usually receive the minerals secondhand, from males. 

And Grandma Bonnie Peters never lived to see more than one hummingbird pollinating her jewelweeds.

Photo by Miroslaw Krol at Pixabay

Desperate female

butterfly seeks males, finds none,

sips at the oil spill.

Four hummingbirds buzz

among her jewelweeds: how

that would have pleased her!

Kudzu grows green through

house and car-strewn yard of the

herbicide sprayer.