Tag: haiku

Sitting outside the New Conway, a pub in a leafy street in Cardiff, on a Saturday night at the beginning of September, sipping a pint of cider while waiting for some friends to turn up.

I had a blank piece of A4 paper and a pen in my pocket. I’d folded the paper before leaving home; it was meant as a stand-in notebook, since I couldn’t find one with any empty pages.

I decided to write some haikus to pass the time. The paper had been folded three times giving eight rectangles of pure white space on each side – each rectangle the perfect size to accommodate a handwritten haiku. I thought, if, by the time I’d written sixteen haikus, our friends hadn’t turned up, we’d go home,

I managed to write six – here they are, straight from the paper – unedited. Turns out they are a bit of a haiku sequence.

haikus, things to do
when you're bored outside a pub
and friends don't turn up

autumn is delayed
by a burst of summer sun
birds take advantage

near summer's end
yellowing leaves start their trip
to the brown gutter

like a dance they swirl
on the pavements, in the road
then they separate

noisy crows in trees
saying goodbye to the sun
when it's gone, they stop

on the bark of trees
forests of green moss congeal
it's complicated