Okay, readers. It’s time for another haiku poetry challenge. We of the iowa-mariner.com blog periodically craft a haiku poem. For the youngsters who have forgotten the rules and for those new to the blog, here are the rules for writing haiku poetry:

• Haiku is a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world.
• (an English imitation of this.)
• Haiku poems don’t need to rhyme, but for more of a challenge some poets try to rhyme lines 1 and 3.

Abandoned buildings
Along the street row on row
They watch and they wait

Across the dark street
I ponder a lonely house
I hear it sobbing

© 2016 Darlene De Beaulieu

Nature’s wake from sleep
Life flirts with beauty
a time for flowers to flaunt

 ©2016 Funom Makama

Our day-to-day life
Wrestles with that moment when
One day will suffice

2016 Ancient Mariner

Haiku discipline forces the mind to think thematically and procedurally at the same time. It is a nice replacement when crossword puzzles no longer satisfy. One is not caged as in soduko. A winning haiku invokes empathetic feelings.

Ancient Mariner