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Haiku fever

The National Haiku Writing Month, February 2011, is now over. This was a month of writing at least one haiku each day. It has been a wonderful experience: the writing was great, the organizer and host Michael Dylan Welch (Graceguts) guided the group gently but steadily and the comments were very helpful without being overwhelming. Thank you Michael Dylan Welch, Alan Summers, and fellow participants!

I treated this writing month as a writing retreat. Reading up on haiku technique, enjoying other people’s haiku and getting into the habit of observing my own personal responses to the world. It is like learning to frame in words moments, like a photographer captures them in pictures or an artist sketches them. It is a form of mediation of experience and meditation in one.

Now that it is over, while I miss the discipline of the writing challenge, the support and energy of the community, I also know I gained enough to continue the practice.

I was chaffed when one of my own haiku was one among those highlighted in Red Dragonfly by Melissa Allen. You can read her whole post and enjoy her selections; better still, read her blog!  By the way, she writes great experimental as well as ‘normal’ haiku.

While the actual NaHaiWriMo is now officially over, Alan Summers of With Words and Area 17 has agreed to continue prompting eager haiku poets for the month of March. I look forward to responding to the prompts as well as Alan’s, and the participants’ most helpful comments

I am finding out about the plethora of haiku groups and communities writing and commenting on each other’s work. I will be catching up with them soon. Meanwhile, I am exploring The Haiku Foundation’s site and blog: a vital resource for those bitten by the haiku bug.

As of today, I will be posting my haiku in my main blog, in my growing collection of haiku and also in Stella’s Stones; as usual, I will tweet it as well! Haiku published elsewhere will be presented with fanfare!

The file NaHaiWriMo (National Haiku Writing Month) will be active again next year, in February, when the next official NaHaiWriMo will be taking place.

52/250, Blog, Short stories

Stone story

Although Kareem is eight, he looks more like twelve. This is neither due to his hairstyle, nor to the long trousers and T-shirt he is wearing; rather the serious expression on his face, and the way he looks at you, straight in the eye. He sells stones.

He picked them himself carefully: not too big, for they will not travel far; not too small, for they will impress no one. He arranged them on his wooden tray and priced them accordingly: regular, one piastra; medium, two.

By the time the protesters wake up, he is standing in the furthest corner of the square, holding his tray for them to buy his stones. He pockets the notes and coins, and by the end of the first day of business he has enough money to buy his mother flatbread and tahina; and to pay off the loan to Aziz for the trip on the felucca he didn’t want his mother to know about.

On the second day though, the protest turns violent and few buy his stones; many grab them and run. Kareem ties his money in his handkerchief, puts it in his trouser pocket and starts for home.

Hours later, when he comes to, long after the van that knocked him unconscious sped away, he feels for his bundle. It is no longer there. His strength gone, he falls back to the ground and closes his eyes. He now looks the boy of eight he is.

This story first appeared on the writers’ challenge site 52|250 A Year of Flash