Reading Haiku

Welcome. We are on Day 21 of 30 days of VerseLove. Let’s circle back to haiku for brevity, but with a new perspective from today’s host.

Our Host

In May of 2025, Sharon Roy retired from 31 years of teaching  middle school in Austin, TX where she lives with her husband. Now she enjoys riding her bike to take herself on field trips to swim at Barton Springs, bird with Travis Audubon Society, admire the art at local museums, read outside in parks and take classes with a local lifelong learning institute.  She volunteers with Travis Audubon Society,  leading  a monthly poetry-writing and birding walk. She’s enjoying more time to write poetry which she shares at her blog, Pedaling Poet: Riding to Find the Strange and the Sublime. 

Inspiration 

I’m doing a slow read of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace with Simon Haisell of Footnotes and Tangents. We’re reading a chapter a day for all of 2026. On New Year’s Day, I wrote some haiku about the new year including looking forward to the slow read. I decided to continue  the haikus to help me better understand my reading and to keep track of Tolstoy’s many characters. Rewriting War and Peace in haiku has become my passion project for the year. I write haikus about what happened in the chapter and how it connects to my life and to other works of art.

Process

• Pick a text that you are reading or a favorite text.
• Rewrite part of your selected text  in haiku, three lines of 5/7/5 syllables.
  • You might want to focus on a favorite scene, a page you turn to at random, or  the chapter you read most recently. You could also  zoom out to focus on the whole work.
• You can write one haiku, a few, or many.
• You might also choose to write haiku about how the writing connects to your life or to other works of art.
• Give credit to the original writer and text.
• Need a syllable counter? I sometimes use howmanysyllables.com.
• Want a jump start? Maybe one of these questions will spark your writing today:
  • What book has stuck with you lately? Why?
  • What wisdom did you gain from the text?
  • What do you agree or disagree with most from the text?
  • Which character would you like to have dinner with? What would you discuss? What question would you ask the character?
  • How does the text relate to your daily life?
  • What memory from childhood does the text evoke?
  • What could our community learn from the text?
  • If you’ve taught this book, why did you select it? What did you hope students would gain from reading and discussing?
  • What’s one thing that you admire about the author’s craft?
  • If Paul Thomas Anderson made a movie of the text, what song would he use as a needledrop to set the mood for a scene? 
  • If you made a playlist to accompany the book, what song(s) would you include?
  • What painting or sculpture would make a good companion work of art? Why?

Sharon’s Poem

Pale Blue Eyes

Tolstoy’s War and Peace in Haiku

Book I Part III Chapter X

Richie Rich Rostov
Buys his fourth horse for two gold
Beautiful French horse

Rostov’s beloved
Tsar looks straight into his soul
With his pale blue eyes

I hear Lou Reed sing
Linger on your pale blue eyes
Effective mashup

Nik could be singing
“Sometimes I feel so happy”
Today’s needledrop

Humble tsar mumbles
“What terrible thing war is
A terrible thing!”

Out riding my bike
Altered traffic signs show me
My neighbors agree

Stop all way becomes
Stop all war, another, Do
Not enter Gaza

Local graffiti
Artists agree with Tolstoy
Alas wars persist

Tolstoy busts out stats
Nine tenths of our army’s men
In love with their tsar

Nationalism
Persists, frightening degree
Why aren’t we learning?

Your Turn

Now, scroll to the comment section below to write your own poem. (This is a public space, so you may choose to use only your first name or initials depending on your privacy preferences.) Not ready? That’s okay. Read the poems already posted for more inspiration. Ponder your own throughout the day. Return later. And, if the prompt does not work for you, that is fine. All writing is welcome. Just write something. Oh, and a note about drafting: Since we are writing in short bursts, we all understand (and even welcome) the typos and partial poems that remind us we are human and that writing is always becoming. If you’d like to invite other teachers to write with us, tell them to subscribe. Also, please be sure to respond to at least three writers.