Aaron of aanthems.com, recently reemerged from a long break from blogging, tried to register and post and somehow blacklisted himself from my blog. Good job, dude. Aaron is my blogdaddy, the first blogger apart from Anne I ever read, but Anne doesn’t count because I’ve known her since the fifth grade, peered over her shoulder one day in 2000 and said, “What’s a blog? Can I have one?”
In responding to a request I made of him in December 2001, he says:
Miss Lauren commanded, “write a haiku that encapsulates you.” I shot off the cuff, without much design or hemming. Now that I re-read it a couple of days later, I kinda like it.
These large, warm hands open
a shoulder, an ear, for you
find yourself within.
She and I silently disagree whether “open” constitutes one or two syllables, but I have Merriam-Webster on my side. My psyche flushes at the thought of violating the Haiku rules.
Making others write haiku used to be a fond pasttime of mine. I still do it on occasion if someone says he or she is bored. The key is to always supply a topic for the poem: oneself, farticles, defenestration, etc.
And for the record, I maintain that “open” has two syllables. So there.