Literature (Flashback) and Writing Exercise: Richard Wright and the Haiku

You remember our good friend Richard Wright, don't you? You know already and hopefully remember that Richard Wright expatriated to France, where he died.  He spent his last year of life writing haikus.  The Haiku is a Japanese poetic form, a three-line poem where the first line contains 5 syllables, the second line contains 7 syllables, and the third line contains 5 syllables.  Check out these Richard Wright haikus and try writing some of your own.  Maybe submit one as a comment.

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.


From across the lake
Past the black winter trees
Faint sounds of a flute.


With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.


Naked to the sky
A village without a name
In the setting sun.


A spring pond as calm
As the lips of the dead girl
Under its water.


A blacksmith’s hammer
Beating the silver moon thin
On a cool spring night.

Sun is glinting on
A washerwoman’s black arms
In cold creek water.


Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.


I had long felt that
Those sprawling black railroad tracks
Would bring down this snow.


A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.


Scarecrow, who starved you,
Set you in that icy wind,
And then forgot you?


Late one winter night
I saw a skinny scarecrow
Gobbling slabs of meat.