Haiku is the contemplative core: a poem of the natural world, anchored by a season and turned on a moment of sudden attention. It is the form closest to the Iowa lineage I came up in, and the one that asks nothing of other people. It is one person, alone, awake to the world for the length of a breath — an instrument for catching the instant before it passes, and for noticing that the noticing is itself the point.
The haiku moment is the present tense — the thing happening now that will not happen again in just this way.
Each haiku in these pages is set in strict five-seven-five, counted by hand. The image is chosen after the poem is finished — selected from what MidJourney offers, by a single rule: it must move me before I ask whether it fits the verse.
View examples on the main page →