Haiku Entertainment

Typically when Ben and I have down time we like to watch movies on netflicks play our Wii or play some board games, however last night I was not in the mood for any of our usual entertainment tactics. Together we racked our brains for about 15 minutes trying to come up with something adventurous or new to do. Just as I had decided that I was going to give up and settle for one of our usual activities Ben went into our room and pulled out his “Japanese craft book” and said that we should try to doing one of the activities in it to entertain ourselves. I almost rolled my eyes and said “Ha nice try Hun, but that stuff is too kiddy and wont work,” but instead I decided to give it a try and see what it had to offer.

We opened to the first activity which was to draw a Japanese flag … do you know how hard it is to do that? Well all you gotta do is draw a nice big red circle on a white paper and guess what….your done…. Not hard or entertaining at all. So we turned to the second activity which taught about learning to write a “haiku” which is traditionally a Japanese form of poetry.

Now I remembered writing haikus in junior high English classes but didn’t really remember what they were. However, I decided that I would give it a try because Ben actually loves to write Haikus and has written several for some of his Japanese classes and he has even taken the time to write a few for me to tell me that he loves me, so I thought it was worth a shot. ;) In order to make it more interesting I had us sit down and we each wrote out 8 random topics that came to our mind, then drew them out of a hat one by one writing a Haiku about the random topic we had randomly selected. To my surprise it actually turned out to be pretty fun. I wont claim that any of them were “great” by any means, but it was surely entertaining and challenging.

By the way if you don’t know or can’t seem to recall what a haiku is it is a 5,7,5 poem, which means the first and last lines only have 5 syllables and the middle line contains exactly 7 syllables.
The following are the top three Haikus from Ben and the top three from me as well:

Thunder/ Rain                                  Pokemon
It’s cold, damp and wet.                   Benjamin LeSueur
Clouds, gray and gloomy looking      Always gotta catch them all
BOOM! Thunder and rain               Obsessed even then
　Farms                                              Christmas
 Take one, take one more                 Christmas oh Christmas
Now squeeze lightly and gently        Oh how I wait for the day
Milk, … good for your bones          And it’s sweet meaning
　
Silk                                                         Us
Gently blowing silk                         Oh the two of us
I press it’s smooth skin                   We are quiet a lovely pair
So soft! So cuddly !!                       Let’s be ETERNAL

So maybe your poetic, maybe your not, but next time your bored maybe you will try writing something fun, or even find some way to make an exciting game out of something that may seem more or less dull. Give it a chance and discover the possibilities! Keep smiling!

- Lauri

Writing

Our results



Final picks :)