8 Oxygen

Green plants' waste;
Earth's invisible treasure:
now breathe.

GreedyGreeny's post in the poetry thread reminded me of this. Heard about it last night on NPR.

http://www.iscifistory.com/scifaku/elem ... chaiku.asp

That's not even a Haiku. Isn't is 5-7-5 syllables?

Are these Haiku REALLY Haiku? How come they aren't 17-syllables? Where is the season word?

It is a huge misconception in English speaking countries that a haiku must be 17 syllables in 5/7/5 format. Japanese is simply spoken much, much faster than English and they can speak 17 syllables in the same time it takes us to speak 12 of them. A Haiku was originally meant to be spoken, so tempo and duration are very important. 17-syllables is just too long if you want to preserve the original Japanese length.

This 5/7/5 rule was established early on and adopted so ubiquitously that schools, universities, and teachers all mistakenly assumed that the 5/7/5 form was the only correct way to write haiku. It fit very well into our mindset, the way a Shakespearian sonnet does (another strict form in iambic pentameter consisting of 14 lines with a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg).

I do write 5/7/5 haikus - but not as a rule:

weathered hands release
a white heron to the sky
wooden swords banging

(c) Ron Sparks 2001