Gratitude Haiku

While I was at my creativity retreat, I led a workshop on spiritual journaling, and some of the practices we might use, even if we were less than committed to keeping a full-blown journal. We talked about gratitude journals, of course, and the simpler gratitude list, updated daily.

This retreat happened two weeks ago, so I was entering the not-so-euphoric part of National Poetry Month, the part where my daily poem writing bogs down, and I'm grateful for haiku.

Writing haiku always feels a bit like cheating, perhaps because I'm only writing haiku in the sense that I'm following the syllabics for each line. I'm not following the Japanese conventions any further than that.

Still, I find them useful. It's good to think in such compressed form, even though I don't particularly like the haiku I write. I like the process.

Two weeks ago, I started wondering, what if I wrote gratitude haiku? Would I come up with anything neat? Would the compression help or hurt? I want to feel expansive in my gratitude, after all.

Let me give it a try. If I had written a gratitude haiku at the end of the day, what might it have said?

I know that the title sounds British. It's Shakespeare's birthday, after all. If I was a good English major, I'd be writing sonnets today. I've got meetings scheduled today, so maybe instead of feeling irritation at the pointlessness of meetings, I'll write a sonnet.

But first, a gratitude haiku!

Gratitude Whilst Hearing Rain

My soft bed and you.
A roof that keeps out water.
Dinner, wine, and you.