Garden Bloggers' Muse Day: Autumn haiku

Splendid autumn tree at Westonbirt which illustrates the haiku well

Earlier this year I entered Westonbirt's haiku competition to help celebrate the amazing maple display you can always see there at this time of year. Japanese haikus are usually full of calm contemplation: the sharing of a thought in a carefully composed format of 3 lines with 5:7:5 syllables in the lines.

I confess I came up with mine within 5 minutes of reading the Friends of Westonbirt's newsletter and the competition details. That's why I'm filing this post under my Bad Poetry label 😉

However, I've always loved the above photograph I took at Westonbirt many years ago, which I hope forms some compensation for my poetic licence:

Red Orange and Gold

A magical glade transformed

By autumn splendour

If I'd waited I'm sure I could have written something more profound, but I find I quite often want to just splurge what's in my head and get it out there. Besides, most of the posh names for my chosen colours would be hard to fit into the format!

No surprise when the results came out in May: I'm neither among the winners nor the honourable mentions. My bad poetry continues...

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