Japan Fair's haiku contest is back!

Read about my 2025 contest submission and results... here

I've just submitted two more entries for this year.

I'm going to keep them to myself until after the contest ends since that's (I think) more in line with contest rules about submitting pre-published work. I don't think my post for last year's contest violated the spirit of those rules at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could have confused someone anyway.

For now, I want to share two ideas that I drafted but didn't end up submitting.

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Rejected idea 1: School's out

A common experience for me in Seattle is sitting at home, maxing and relaxing, only to be interrupted by an ear-splitting scream. A lot of the time it's just kids playing and either having fun or having taken their fun too far so it's no longer fun for one of the kids... but it is mostly kids. It's become something of a seasonal reminder that ushers in the start of summer break when kids have more time to kill.

Anyway, this idea was supposed to capture the pivot between the aggressive, initial fight-or-flight and the latter internal sigh of relief that "oh yeah it's just the neighborhood kids."

In the end, I don't think I really achieved the effect I was looking for, and it felt kind of... bland.

Oh well, ❌ REJECTED ❌

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Rejected idea 2: Un-haunted house

sigh...

This was my first idea when I started brainstorming for this year's haiku contest, and I was pretty attached to it. I just couldn't make it happen...

A lot of art about the post-apocalypse imagines nature as this unstoppable force that will eventually reclaim human-populated areas and return them back to a more """natural""" state: think crumbling skyscrapers overgrown with moss and sprouting trees until even farther in the future where it's all been entirely eroded and leveled back to a lush green field.

One way to think about this is as a humbling reminder that all of "man vs nature" is a just a war of attrition that man definitely can't win. But it can also be misused as a comforting cope to absolve ourselves of the responsibility and impact our actions have on our ecosystem. "It doesn't matter what we do because once we're gone, the world can adapt and heal itself." I wanted to capture a scenario where human structures have made something unreclaimable, and, once we're gone, those sites will become truly barren. Uninhabitable to even our ghosts, worse than a haunted house, an un-haunted emptiness.

I honestly kind of like the little poem I wrote here, but...

1. I don't think it fits the spirit of a haiku, lacking seasonal reference and kireji.
2. I couldn't figure out how to make its "point" clear enough without a bunch of exposition like this blog post. It's a lot to fit into three lines.

I think maybe one day it'd be a fun creative exercise to fulfill the idea as a series of senryu stanzas.

But for now... ❌ REJECTED ❌

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Anyway, I hope you liked the ideas or liked reading about the ideas! I think what I ended up submitting was at least as good as these and better fit the spirit of the contest and haiku more broadly. I'll definitely share once the contest is over!