A whole world, held for one breath.
The haiku is the smallest poem there is. One moment, noticed, written down before it goes. It argues nothing and decorates nothing. What it asks of you is attention, and then a little patience with the silence that follows.
One image, caught in passing.
Most poems want to tell you something. A haiku just points. The poet saw a frog, heard a bell, felt the first cold rain, and set it down believing the bare fact would carry. No one tells you how to feel. The feeling arrives on its own, in you, a beat late.
Three short lines, and a turn somewhere among them. Then the emptiness the poet left on purpose. This is the ma, the space between, and the image needs it the way a held note needs the rest after it.
01 The 5–7–5 form
The classic shape is three phrases counted out as five, seven, five. Seventeen units, short then long then short. That slight lopsidedness is what gives the poem its music.
Now the part most guides skip. Japanese doesn't count syllables. It counts on (音), or mora, which are smaller and faster than a syllable. One English syllable can swallow two or three of them. Count to seventeen in English and you usually overshoot a real haiku by a fair margin. So take the 5–7–5 as a useful old habit rather than a rule. Plenty of the best English haiku come in nearer to three, five, three. Listen for the breath first. Count later, if at all.
02 Kigo 季語 · the season word
Almost every traditional haiku tells you its season, though never by saying spring. It names a thing that could only belong to spring. That word is the kigo. It ties one passing moment to the turning year, and it arrives already heavy with everything earlier poets felt when they used it.
- 春 cherry blossoms · spring
- 夏 cicada · summer
- 秋 red maple · autumn
- 冬 first snow · winter
Ma is built of four seasons for this reason. Choose one to read or compose in and you've already chosen a mood, before a single word is written.
03 Kireji 切れ字 · the cutting word
Most haiku hold two images with a cut between them. The cut is the kireji. In Japanese it's a small spoken word, like ya or kana, that lands as a pause and a pivot. In English we make the same cut with a dash, a colon, or just the break at the end of a line.
The two images aren't there to explain each other. They sit next to each other and let something pass between them. That gap is the whole point. It's the silence the poem is built around, the ma, and it's where your own mind quietly finishes the thing.
This site takes its name from that pause.
04 The masters
- 芭蕉 Bashō (1644–1694), left his house and walked the country roads, and made the haiku into something close to prayer. Spare, attentive, always listening.
- 蕪村 Buson (1716–1784), a painter first, and you can see it. His poems are full of light, weather, and exact colour.
- 一茶 Issa (1763–1828), warmest of the three. He wrote to flies and snails, joked, and grieved, sometimes in the same breath.
05 How to write your own
- Start from something real. Not a thought about life. A thing you actually saw today. The crow on the wire. Steam coming off the tea.
- Stay with the senses. What you saw, heard, smelled. Name it plainly and let it stand. The object can carry more than you think.
- Cut the abstractions. Beautiful, lonely, forever: strike them out. Skip the metaphors too. Show the thing and leave the feeling alone; it will find its own way out.
- Write it in the present. A haiku is happening now, even on the page, even years later when a stranger reads it.
- Put two images next to each other and stop. Don't bridge them. The reader will, and the bridge they build is the poem.
When you want to try, open compose in Ma. Three lines, a season, and enough quiet to hear whether the words are breathing.
Found a poem mistranslated, or one of your own you'd like to share? Or nothing in particular, just a hello. The door is open.