.
first date
nacho stains
on her blue dress
.
(Feb. 14: nachos. Also: Valentine’s Day.)
.
sun setting
one foot
on a rocky slope
.
(Feb. 20: talus)
.
shaking off
all the rain
that didn’t touch me
.
(Feb. 21: umbrella)
.
________________________________________________________________________________
.
I knew you would all be curious about how I handled “nachos” and “talus.” There is no point in pretending that I have an easier time writing haiku (or senryu) about nachos than anyone else, or that I had the faintest idea what “talus” was before this prompt was set. Also, who else thinks that Michael Dylan Welch opened the dictionary at random to find that prompt? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
It was an interesting month. (Okay, technically it’s not over yet. Can we just pretend it is? In a normal year it would be.) I never felt especially inspired. (Well, I came up with a couple of interesting things about apples, I think. That was then, this is now.) I didn’t like most of what I wrote at all. But there is value in writing things that you don’t like at all. Generally, you have to write a whole lot of things that you don’t like at all in order to write a few things that you like a lot. It’s hard to figure out what you like until you figure out what you don’t.
But I can’t say I’m sorry February is over. Forward, March!
.
Red Dragonfly 
Hi, Melissa, I enjoyed it for the most part because it was a bit of a distraction for me… up to a point. By “U” I just could not go on…. But I think the value of writing all that bad stuff and posting it for us all to laugh at and consider is that we truly develop the inner need to write something with more meat on it so to speak. Still, we come back to our notebooks and find after NaHaiWriMo has passed that we continue to write haiku that won’t hold up on second viewing. You have to wade through a lot of junk to find the jewel.
I haven’t written from a prompt in a long while.
These are nice, and snappy!
Hi Melissa,
I do like some of what you came up with, especially 2/14 & 2/21, the first & third.
What I have been doing this last month instead of NaHaiWriMois Tif Holmes’s “Collaborative Photo-Haiku Project” and it is teaching me a lot about haiga, although, like you, I am far from happy with some of my individual examples.
If you want to take on another artificial challenge it would be so good to meet there . . . not necessarily daily, but sometimes.
It is found at http://tifholmesphotography.com/cphp/ (or look at this month’s photos at http://tifholmesphotography.com/cphp/category/2012/february-2012-series/ )
Thanks for the link, Kris… I’ve posted it on my FB page and on Twitter. Lovely photography, I must say!
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I’ll just have you know that I ain’t never opened no dictionary at random to find the word talus! 🙂 As a hiker, I’ve hiked over talus and scree many times, and have always liked the word. I selected nearly all of the prompts before the month even started (they were all alphabetical, up to day 26), although I did change a couple of them at the last minute. I had also wanted at least one word during NaHaiWriMo to be unusual or uncommon, and “talus” was it. It was tough, even for me. I also found “opera” to be tougher than I expected. “Nachos,” though, proved to be remarkably inspiring for many people, in both fun and serious ways. However, the most moving and consistently stunning poems submitted on the Facebook page during NaHaiWriMo were, by far, on the theme of grief.
All coming round again in the soon-to-be-published NaHaiWriMo book! Not too late for folks to submit (even if you didn’t like all the poems you wrote for the month).
Good to know, Michael. 😉 Yeah, “opera” was a hard one too. I wrote something that used the word in its Latin sense of “works” but I’m not letting anyone see it. 😉