Sunday, June 15, 2008

A Haiku for Chicago

R Kelly is free yet is not my poet
Hearts are too often swayed and fooled
My heart bleeds for St. Sabina's Catholic Church.

6 comments:

Kai said...

i think r. kelly is guilty.

Rich Fitzgerald said...

While I think he is guilty and that his money got him off, I have another comment.

Traditionally and by definition a haiku consists of 17 syllables divided into 3 lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables.

Nice poem, but this wouldn't be considered a haiku. Just thought you should know.

CapCity said...

I just keep rKellz & the sistahs who do anything for the attention of "stars" in prayer.

@ Rich - Thanx 4 that lesson. It's details like that which prevent me from categorizing my poems. Everything I do is "free style". LOL!

Jayn Sean said...

Wow!

Sharon shares said...

Excellent haiku Chris...it does what it is most important for a haiku to do in my opinion and that is to encapsulate an idea, thought, or concept as precisely and concisely as possible. You my brother have done just that for the Chicago that exists today!

To CapCity and Rich:
CC my sistah, like you I hesitate to define my pieces for similar reasons and Rich you are correct in terms of your definition and the fact that it is the most widely accepted definition of haiku. However, Haiku is an art form that has it origins in the Japanese culture and contrary to popular belief, the 5-7-5 cadence that we apply to the number of syllables each line should have originally applied to the number of Japanese sounds each line should have. As a consequence of this, most western haikus are actually much longer than the original concept of what a haiku was meant to be as in the Japanese language a word such as haiku itself is actually 3 syllables instead of the two it contains in English and thus would make the poem longer if indeed it was used in the writing of a haiku.

One other thing, there are actually books that advocate other rythmic cadences for the haiku such as 8-9-8, 7-9-7...so whose the final authority? I only know these things because I have been practicing haiku writing in an attempt to streamline my fiction writing. As this post indicates, it is not working as well as any of us might have hoped it would ;b

Okay, lesson over and I said all that to say conventional haiku or not, potato/potahtoe, this one was on point!

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