I love to share poetry and creative expression of all kinds with other people, and I'm so excited to start sharing a weekly poetry challenge with the world.  We'll be exploring a variety of poetic forms and prompt themes, to push ourselves into new styles of expression and creative release.  This first week, we'll start simply with the Haiku!

I don't mean to imply that a haiku is an easy poem to master.  Its simplicity is a part of its beauty, and it takes practice to create a story arch over such a short space.  This traditional Japanese poem has a strict format that is traditionally only 17 symbols, structured in three lines of 5/7/5.

This is a haiku.
It has seven syllables,
followed by five more.

Haiku capture a snapshot of the world in a few words.  They're often composed of incomplete thoughts, though they can form complete, proper sentence structure.  It's a short form burst of wordplay that has become an all-time favorite to write, and I'm proud to say that my first personal collection of poetry was a private collection of haiku. I'm really looking forward to sharing these with all of you, and I can't wait to see what you create!  Please share your haiku creations in the comments below.