Driving back from the grocery store this morning, I admired the puffy white clouds fleeing across a bright blue Autumn sky. As I passed the lake in town, I noticed white caps attesting to wind and faintly mimicking the ocean.
The idea for a haiku started to form, so, as soon as I could, I wrote it down:
The frothy lips of
ocean waves come from kissing
the clouds of meringue.
Interesting idea, but the poem itself read to me like a flat statement of prose. The matter of endline words bothered me too. i.e., Typically, I try to avoid ending a line of verse with prepositions, articles, or other non-descriptive words, such as “of.” And last, but probably most important, the “clouds of meringue” didn’t seem as fresh to me as the thought of “frothy lips.” So I kept playing around with the words, rearranging them like furniture until this poem resulted.
Clouds of meringue kiss
the water, leaving frothy
lips of ocean waves.
This revision seemed to me to have more musicality with words arranged to maximize the order of interest. So now I can leave the poem as is or wait awhile to reconsider the lines, and maybe see if those “frothy lips” can have the poem’s last word.
©2023
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Mary Harwell Sayler 