English Haiku

There are few things more tedious than bad haiku written in English. They are the bane of every college, literature class. Here’s mine:

APOCRYPHA (A POEM)

One Sunday as a child, I sat in church listening to our pastor deliver a sermon on the Last Judgement. Being a kid with an active imagination, I envisioned angels using TVs to show sinners our sins.

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of poetry, poets used cadence rather than rhyme to weave their spell. These poets used alliteration to drive the beat of their spoken words. Being a fan of Anglo-Saxon poetry, I have tried to tried to do the same.

THE POET (A POEM)

A ridiculous nightmare in which I found myself back in college and attending an equally ridiculous poetry reading inspired this piece. After I wrote down the entire dream, I decided to focus solely on the poet.

A SUMMER HAIKU FOR MY MOM

To use a poetic form that is best suited for one language to compose a poem in another is always touch-and-go. And haiku is one such form. I think this works better as two lines rather than three.

I wrote this in August of 2005 after seeing a small kite hung up on power lines and remembering how when I was a child, my mom and I entangled a kite on nearby power lines. I remember looking at my mom mortified and saying: “Wait ’till dad sees this.” My dad was not amused.

for my mom
Summer-colored kite and a boy’s hot tears
Hung up with high-tension lines.

©2005 Kent Gutschke.  All rights reserved..

THE THANG: A SCI-FI LULLABY

May 26, 2017.

In a brittle issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from November 1952, I stumbled across a short story entitled “Bem” by sci-fi author Charles T. Webb. His story so amused me that I decided to write my own using “Bem” as one inspiration and the 1897 UFO crash in Aurora, Texas as another. And without my knowing it, my prose fell into rhythm with rhymes and near rhymes, and to my amazement, I had the first two stanzas of a poem.

Any fans of sci-writer Henry Kuttner will see that I also took inspiration from his Galloway Gallagher story entitled “The World Is Mine” first published in Astounding Stories in June 1943 under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett.