Examples

Haiku About Nature: Examples from Our Archive

Nature is haiku's home ground. The fourteen haiku below come from our own archive, published poems by our contributors, arranged by season and each linked to its page.

Haiku began as nature poetry and never really left it. The classical form asks for a season word, a kigo, and even where modern poets loosen that rule, most haiku still turn on something seen outdoors: a bird, a frost, a change in the light. What follows is not a list of the "best" nature haiku ever written. It is a walk through one archive, ours, showing how living poets handle the oldest subject the form has.

A note on reading them: every poem here follows the 5-7-5 count, and every one holds at least two things in tension, an image and a second image, or an image and a sound. Watch for where each poem turns. And watch what the poets leave out. None of these fourteen tells you the woods are peaceful or the snow is beautiful. They hand you the frost, the frog, the acorn, and step back.

Each poet's name links to the poem's own page in our archive, where you can read it in its published issue.

Spring

Spring haiku tend to be poems of return: birds back, ice going, the first sound of something that was silent all winter. Notice how often the season arrives through the ear rather than the eye.

First springtime cricket Dawn chorus percussionist Raindrops answeringLaurie Beringer

honking geese fly north winter melt begins-spring comes one drip at a timeNells Wasilewski

Wasilewski's poem measures the whole season in a single drip. That is the haiku move: pick the smallest true detail and let it stand for the change. The next two work by touch and by close attention to one small creature.

Light mist on new leaves, bare feet swish through cool, wet grass. Bullfrog calls the dance.Allen Guest

upon the flower bumblebee high on pollen burrows into springLuke Levi

Summer

Summer's classic season words are insects and heat: cicadas, fireflies, the short night. Fireflies show up in our archive year after year, and the good firefly poems always put something else beside the light.

Fireflies dart and flash Among the oaks and dogwoods. Porch swing softly creaks.Rlm Cooper

red-winged blackbird’s flight among the summer rainfall a blue sky promiseJoanna Ashwell

Late summer is its own subject, the season already leaning toward the next one. These two catch that hinge.

Bee shadows flutter Over lavender blossoms - Summer's end beginsRobert Walton

late summer twilight far across this empty lake two or three voicesSean O'connor

"Two or three voices" is worth sitting with. The poem never says the summer is ending or the lake is lonely. It counts voices, imprecisely, the way you actually would across water, and the feeling arrives on its own. That restraint, showing instead of telling, is the core of the craft, and it is the hardest habit for a new writer to learn.

Autumn

Autumn owns more season words than any other time of year: the harvest moon, migrating geese, falling leaves. The risk is that these images are worn smooth. The poems below stay fresh by getting specific, an acorn rather than "the fall," a seven point buck rather than "wildlife."

to be an acorn falling to musty humus cracking Earth openMary Catherine Harper

autumn equinox a seven point buck wanders through the neighborhoodBruce Feingold

fallen maple leaf cradled in her tiny hand autumn lullabyPatricia Pella

Pella's poem also shows the two-image structure at work: leaf in the first line, child's hand in the second, and the third line lets them meet. In Japanese that pivot is marked by a cutting word; in English the line break carries it.

Winter

Winter haiku are poems of subtraction. Snow erases sound and color, and what remains gets all the attention. Kauderer's poem below is nearly all silence; it spends its seventeen syllables describing what cannot be heard, and the ears in the last line make the quiet physical.

snowfall in stillness consuming all other sounds softening my earsHerb Kauderer

Canopy of snow -- Even the birds are silent. White cat vanishes.F.h. Thurmond

iced pond, heron poised silver gleams through cracked surface frozen dinner servedChrista Planko

Planko's heron earns its dry last line because the first two lines did honest looking first. Wit in a nature haiku only lands when the observation underneath it is real.

Write your own

Every poem above started the same way, with a poet outdoors paying attention. If you want to try, our guide to writing a haiku walks through the steps, what is haiku covers the form itself, and the season-word list in our kigo guide is a good place to hunt for a first image. Thousands more poems, on nature and everything else, are in our free issues and theme pages, and when you have three lines you trust, send them to us.