Remember the Hexapod Haiku Contest? I submitted this one:
Dusty, dun mothlet,
What gives your kind the license
to eat Captain Crunch?
The NC State University Insect Museum judges say:
What a delightful haiku! We can all relate to the indignation Gail feels upon discovering a cupboard infestation. The first line reads as if it was written by the Bard of Ayrshire himself, but we are jerked forward 200 years in 2 lines, with Gail's almost hypermodern reference to Cap'n Crunch™. A wonderful manipulation of language.
There's even an illustration at the link. And Jake gets an honorable mention for:
Green lady devours
her lover boy's head, better
she thinks, than a smoke
Hmmm, I wonder why they didn't like mine.
Posted by: CraigC | March 30, 2008 at 11:12 AM
Congrats to Gail and Jake! Excellent!
Posted by: JWebb | March 30, 2008 at 05:45 PM
Did you submit it or just put it up on ST?
Posted by: gail | March 30, 2008 at 06:16 PM
Right on! Congrats Gail and Jake!
Posted by: Pixie | March 30, 2008 at 10:28 PM
I kid.
Posted by: CraigC | March 31, 2008 at 12:44 AM
English master, I bow in grasshopperness...
Really, though, great!
Posted by: MC | March 31, 2008 at 05:28 AM
i still don't get what it means... did you intend the 2oo year forward jump ? these haikus look more surrealist, at least that's what i can make of them, for their meaning escapes me
Posted by: Candycane | March 31, 2008 at 06:19 AM
Candycane, it's about little brown moths that get into your pantry and eat your cereals.
Posted by: gail | March 31, 2008 at 07:01 AM
The judge was right to compare the first line to Robert Burns although I didn't think of it at the time. There's nothing surrealist about it though. I called the moth a "mothlet" because it was very tiny. I called it "dusty" because moths have a kind of dusty covering that comes off on your fingers if you pick one up. And I called it "dun" because that's a word for "dull brown." Sometimes the challenge of writing a haiku is to get all that you want to say into the word limit of each line in a way that sounds pretty and in the case of a funny haiku makes people smile.
Oh, and "giving license" means giving permission. So the haiku says, who gave you little dusty brown moths permission to get into my cabinet and eat my cereal?
Posted by: gail | March 31, 2008 at 07:45 AM