Poetry Friday--Kipling Wrote Haiku?

No, of course, he didn't, but there is yet another crazy internet site, Hiddenhaiku.com, which creates fake haiku--this one takes sentences from the works of famous writers, like Kipling, and divides them into three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. Here's an example of a Dickens "haiku" from A Christmas Carol:

It was clothed in one
simple green robe, or mantle,
bordered with white fur.

And another from Lewis Carroll (can you guess the source?):

It's the stupidest
tea-party I ever was
at in all my life!

And a third from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson:

And then, all of a
sudden, a shrill voice broke forth
out of the darkness

Always one to look on the bright side of things, even things that annoy the hell out of me, I decided to make some use of these fake haiku. For instance, the one from Dickens, I used as a prompt that resulted in:

october snow--
the white cat not white
for long

Carroll's morphed into:

the three-year-old
offers a bottle cap cup...
mud puddle tea

And Stevenson's I re-imagined as:

the dream ends
with a shrieking jay
...summer dawn

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved

Hey, they ain't great, but I think it's safe to say they're closer to haiku than the originals!

Visit Susan Taylor Brown for this week's Poetry Friday Round-Up.

And by the way, the book I tucked under Kipling's arm is Jane Reichhold's Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-On Guide (Kodansha, 2003).