Haiku ContestTime for our fourth annual SPECULATIVE FICTION HAIKU CONTEST!  Anyone can do this!

As a reminder, here are the rules:

For haiku, the typical subject matter is nature, but if you decide to be traditional, you must give it a fantasy, science fiction, or horror twist. We expect to be told that the peaceful wind you describe is blowing across a landscape of an unfamiliar, distant planet. And if your poem is about a flower, we hope that elegant little touch of beauty is about to be trampled by an Orc. We welcome the sublime as well as the humorous, the pedestrian along with the momentous.

Though you may use the traditional three-line haiku following a 5-7-5 syllable pattern, feel free to break that pattern. Many poets who write English haiku adhere to other expectations:

  1. Written in three lines, though sometimes in two or four lines
  2. Often offers a juxtaposition of two images or ideas
  3. Doesn’t rhyme
  4. Often uses a season-term or a word/phrase that implies a time of year
  5. Employs compressed, objective, descriptive language
  6. Often divided in two parts (the break usually comes at the end of the first line, the middle of the second line, or the end of the second line).

As inspiration, here are a few from last year:

To tremble and rage
Is the nature of the sea
Caught between two moons.

The engineer dreams
Of an AI breakthrough
As the AI dreams
Of breaking through

Blackened limbs wasting,
Water ceasing, stones settling:
Our final season.

Tentacled spheroid
Sitting by the warp-drive doors
Please don’t drip acid

Elric’s Grand Sword Fights;
Ripples Across Multiverse.
. . . (i’ve lost a button)

Our interference
Disrupts the spinning seasons
Wakes the sleeping one.

Meditating minds
Explode into the future
Dragons flying high

Read more.

You may write as many haiku as you like. We’ll choose one author to win a book from our stacks.

Author

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