The Teen Writing Club I run at my library decided to continue with poetry for a little while. We’ll be going over the more popular forms of poetry, exploring the specific structures as well as the poets that are known for writing those specific forms. And we’ll also be experimenting by writing some of them or something related to them. I’m trying to get them to focus on word choice and how words sound and feel in order to evoke certain feelings or experiences.
For the first week, I went over haikus and tankas with them because I thought it would be fun and it’s also a little less complex than some of the other traditional forms of poetry. So as we go over these forms and dabble in writing poems, I’ll probably share what I come up with during our meetings. Here are a few haikus and tankas I wrote.
“Dog”
Floofy tail, soft fur
eyes like chocolate hearts
best friend forever
“Night”
Across the sky, stars
streak like ribbons of gold
light among the dark
“slimy frog”
slimy, sleepy ooze
slips upon the mossy rocks
water gurgles, “plop”
“Beach Life”
Sunshine bumbles grass
flutters wind through seashells
the beach waves to ocean
“Adrift”
Ghosts drift in silence
across a sea of ice and salt.
Shattered screams echo
of dark nights forgotten.
Survivors are the only light.
“Up”
Balloons rise across
cotton clouded skies of blue,
floating high upon
the currents of fortune,
reaching the expanse of space.
“Sunflowers”
Yellow petals bloom
across fields of green and gold,
following sunlight
like Peter Pan’s shadow,
rising toward the open sky.
Keeper of the Wood Between Worlds 
Fun! Haikus can be a lot of fun to compose. I never tried tankas personally, but I think I like the three-line structure of the haiku better. Maybe just because I’m more used to the form, hmm.
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Right, I didn’t even know what tankas were until I was looking up stuff about haikus. I think for me the tankas are nice because it gives you a little more to work with. One of the tankas above (“Adrift”) started as a haiku but I didn’t have enough syllables/lines to express the full thought and feeling so I expanded it into a tanka and it came out good in my opinion.
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