NaHaiWriMo Week 4 + 1

February is NaHaiWriMo: National Haiku Writing Month. I've been posting a daily haiku on Twitter and Facebook. These are my tweets from the fourth week plus Leap Day.

My Feb. 22 haiku is a metaphor for the reaction against the Virginia General Assembly with respect to HB462.

My Feb. 24 haiku references these shots of ibises.

My Feb. 25 haiku was inspired by these 3D street paintings.

My Feb. 26 haiku was inspired by this shot of the Moon and Venus and the mall from whose parking lot I had taken the photo.

Haikus from Week 1
Haikus from Week 2
Haikus from Week 3

Unlike the rest of the month, when I had done my own thing, I followed the prompts on the final three days. I wrote two haiku on the 27th because after I'd finished my mockingbird piece I saw that the prompt had been to write a bad haiku.

I couldn't resist that one. So I wrote a sequel. My original:

mockingbird argues
against the finer points
of rain

And my "bad haiku":

mockingbird rains
something that looks like snow
but it's not

Equally tempting, the prompt for the 28th was to rewrite an auto-generated haiku. I did a search for "haiku generator" and used this one, which gave me:

masks disperse, lean
bears collapsing, grayly, ghosts
marvel, flailing swine

My rewrite:

splash in mist
polar bear on spectral floe
evaporates

Finally I followed the Feb. 29 prompt, "leap" in honor of the leap day, and wrote what you see tweeted above.

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Thanks to LordRyche over at clanbod.com , who named Deviations in response to the thread, "What's ur fav. book(s)?" and wrote, "It's been a very good story so far...I'm really enjoying it. Plus, the entire series was FREE on Kindle! Tough to beat FREE and GOOD! hehe." (At the time of the writing, he was in the middle of Vol. 2, Appetite.)

And my poem "Ybba" was cited as a "classic work" in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

What's particularly neat there is that "Ybba" had marked my official entrance into speculative poetry. I had literally drafted it on the back of a Science Fiction Poetry Association flyer while I attended an SF poetry panel at Noreascon II in Boston (my first Worldcon) in 1980.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.