Haiku 2023–196

metaphoric hills

and figurative valleys

amongst the real ones

— —

While a good portion of Ohio consists of the corn and soybean fields it’s known for, I live and work in the “bumpy” part of Ohio full of small hills and valleys. My office sits on one of these hills overlooking the valley the city sits in. While having lunch there and contemplating the lack of haiku ready for publication, I began to think about how my writing is a series of ups and downs. Some days creativity flows like a stream after days of steady rain, other times it’s like a dry creek bed in the middle of August. If you were to plot this on a graph, it would be full of peaks and troughs that in some ways resemble the hills and valleys I call my home. In the end, this haiku describes more than the ebbs and flows of the creative process, it really describes life in general — as “bumpy” of an adventure as has ever existed.

For a peek behind the curtain on this one, I got stuck on the phrase ‘figuratively and literally’ for a good while when fleshing this out. This phrase proved problematic for two reasons. The first is obvious — it’s ten syllables and just doesn’t want to be broken easily. Second, that phrase threatens to come across as being cliche. A quick perusal of thesaurus entries for ‘figurative’ brought the word ‘metaphoric’ into the toolbox. A few minutes of word rearranging from there yielded a much better haiku — one that I really enjoy.