A handful of stars

Not all haikus here are old

Photo taken with an iPhone 14 Pro a little before 6:00 am CDT in Driftwood, Texas

A handful of stars
blazed among the drifting clouds
early this morning. 

Louise the dog and Margo the cat in a resting state

This morning Margo the cat and Louise the dog decided we three had slept long enough.

Louise and I walked out into the predawn morning while Margo watched us from the front door. Clouds had blown in over night from the south and the west. Driftwood sits between two dark skies communities (Wimberley to the west, and Dripping Springs to the north). Since Driftwood is a large unincorporated area the skies in Driftwood are even darker. That means the stars shine brightly almost every night, even when the clouds persist like they did this morning.

As Louise and I walked among the stars and clouds, the haiku formed itself in my mind.

Photo of Comet A3 taken on October 14, 2024, If you look closely you can see a few stars shining high in the still bright sky.

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About this haiku thing: Many of us remember learning about and writing haikus early in our schooling. It was in the fourth or fifth grade when I first learned of the haiku form.

While I enjoy reading poetry, I rarely enjoyed writing poems. I always felt the structure was limiting. Even more so with a haiku where one was limited to a total of 17 syllables, five, then seven and ending with five.

For my 61^st birthday in 2019 my older brother gave me a book of haikus. That stirred my interest in them once again. Reading the haikus got my mind thinking in a 5/7/5 pattern. Then for Christmas of that same year my brother and his wife gave me a set of haiku dice.

During Lent of 2020 I wrote 40 haikus (Haikus for Lent) with a photo and a short story related to the haiku on my Facebook account. That generated good interest from my Facebook friends and I ended up continuing the series with Haikus for these times, Haikus for different times and Haikus for another time.

The haikus became a journal for me, an on again, off again chronicle of what at best can be called strange times.

I found that the short poem, photo and story is a nice way to frame and present a new topic or idea and I have incorporated that approach in my paying job as an Agile coach in the software world.