Winter, they want me
to write a haiku, Summer,
I still don’t know how.

Mini Rationale

I think this was received as a ‘cop-out’ piece and I totally get that. The truth is, I had never written a Haiku before this, I didn’t know how. There were a few times throughout my childhood that I would come across concepts that I just didn’t understand or was easily confused by. Often this was because I missed so many foundational subjects in school and so never covered it as a kid, leaving me to find it difficult to wrap my head around it later. Now, to the point (please don’t laugh): I didn’t understand how syllables work. I knew that a Haiku was comprised of a strict number of syllables, but I didn’t understand how to count them properly. The only time I covered syllables in class was once in year five and it was one lesson because of the time I’d changed schools. By the time a Haiku was something brought up in class at uni, I was too embarrassed by my confusion to really try because I didn’t want to embarrass myself… and then it was a mandatory poem in the portfolio. I even ran it through a syllable counter because I didn’t trust myself.

The poem was also considered not traditional enough.