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Mindful Minute

Spooky Haiku 🕷️🕸️

Join us to write a haiku during the spooky season! Submissions will be displayed on our giant spider web on the 1st floor. 🕷️🕸️

Take a break from the stress of the day & enjoy this month’s self-guided activity. This month, write up your own spooky Haiku and submit it for display on our GIANT spiderweb, located on the 1st floor of the library. 🦇🎃🕷️🕸️

A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.

Discover more poetic terms.

History of the Haiku Form

Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of renga, an oral poem, generally a hundred stanzas long, which was also composed syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the sixteenth century and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho, who wrote this classic haiku:

     An old pond!
     A frog jumps in—
     the sound of water.

As the form has evolved, many of its regular traits—including its famous syllabic pattern—have been routinely broken. However, the philosophy of haiku has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment.

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