One morning I woke up with a dream still in my head where someone was trying to persuade me to write haiku, and the dream was still loud enough in my ears by the time I got to the bathroom that I found myself sitting there trying to meet the challenge. The first version of the lines below was constructed according to the haiku convention often assumed in English haiku (three lines in a 5-7-5 syllable configuration), but I've always been obsessed* with precision and economy in writing. And I remembered reading that equating Japanese hiragana to English syllables doesn't exactly work, because the English syllable is a coarser-grained unit of phonology than the Japanese on. So here’s an attempt at a more ‘authentic’ version.
challenge failed
new page despoiled in vain
no haiku skills
Of course, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attempt to apply the Japanese rules to English syllables, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. So the first line has three spoken syllables, but if I've done this right counts as five on because of the double consonants in 'challenge'; the second line has six syllables but seven on because 'vain' ends with an 'n'; and the last line has four syllables but five on because the 'hai' in 'haiku counts as two morae, not one. Though I'm a bit worried by the long 'o' in the English word 'No'. There is, of course, no guarantee that I have got this right, because my knowledge of Japanese is virtually non-existent. But no doubt someone who knows more than I do (not difficult...) will come along and correct me eventually.
Oh, and the reason that this is probably a (sort of...) senryū rather than a haiku is that I haven't used a nature word - I could have substituted 'leaf' for 'page', but that seemed like cheating and probably wouldn't have cut it anyway. But perhaps I should have called it haikai. (To emphasise its flippancy, perhaps, though the term haikai can apparently include both haiku and senryū.)
I should probably get a life. Anyway, if I continue to experiment with this curiously alluring genre, I'll probably worry less about the form and more about the content. After all, there is such a thing as a free-form haiku. Though I think this one works quite well as a sort of epigram... So time for a tot of Suntory, I think. 😉
*Even in Junior School, my favourite English exercise was précis; decades later, when writing abstracts for projected conference papers and articles, I went out of my way to generate exactly the prescribed maximum number of words; and my proudest programming achievement was cutting someone else's assembler program from 14 bytes to 12 without introducing even the tiniest change to its functionality.