A Haiku portraiture to Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox

A Haiku portraiture to Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox by Shaun Mullins, 2021.

winter cumulus

cowboys and desert roses

eyes for mischief make

Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly National Monument Arizona, 1937, Ansel Adams.

This is an Haiku exercise, using a photograph that I chose for the subject motivator for my Haiku, that I submitted to my South East Region Student Group, as part of a group exercise.

Wikipedia definition of an English Haiku.

“Haiku” in English is a term sometimes loosely applied to any short, impressionistic poem, but there are certain characteristics that are commonly associated with the genre:

• a focus on nature or the seasons^[1][2]
• a division into two asymmetrical sections that juxtaposes two subjects (e.g. something natural and something human-made, two unexpectedly similar things, etc.)
• a contemplative or wistful tone and an impressionistic brevity^[3][4][5]
• “telegram style” syntax; no superfluous words
• an emphasis on imagery over exposition
• avoidance of metaphor and similes
• non-rhyming lines

Some additional traits are especially associated with English-language haiku (as opposed to Japanese-language haiku):

• a three-line format with 17 syllables arranged in a 5–7–5 pattern;^{[2][a][6][7][8]} or about 10 to 14 syllables,^[9][10] which more nearly approximates the duration of a Japanese haiku^[11] with the second line usually the longest. Some poets want their haiku to be expressed in one breath^[12][13][14]
• little or no punctuation or capitalization, except that cuts are sometimes marked with dashes or ellipses and proper nouns are usually capitalized