Beyond a poet’s use of a given season word, there are other factors that influence our reading of a haiku. Rhythm, sound, inflection, mood, tone—these all contribute to the net effect of a poem. Because haiku is a form of popular literature, phrasing is especially important. If a poet echoes common idioms or expressions from everyday speech, those will add further nuance and depth. The winning and honorable mention entries for last month’s challenge each played off elements of colloquial language to produce a satisfying 17-syllable poem.

  • Jesus Santos captures the mood of 2025 with a mouth that opens wide in the looming darkness “to swallow the final bait.”
  • Nancie Zivetz-Gertler “gets to do less” as the days grow shorter and night comes early.
  • Susan Bender imagines the relief the sunshine must feel when, “after so much light,” the season of darkness finally arrives.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the current challenge here.

Winter Season Word: Night Comes Early

WINNER:

the night comes early
to swallow the final bait
the mouth opens wide

— Jesus Santos

The symmetrical structure of the haiku form naturally lends itself to grammatical ambiguity. This is by design. Especially in English, where haiku often lack punctuation, grammatical uncertainty makes it possible to read the same poem in several different ways.

Last month’s winning haiku offers a case in point. Has the night come early to swallow the shortest day of the year? If so, the darkness is like a great fish devouring the light. But what if we read “the night comes early” as its own sentence? In that case, the mouth could be that of a real fish in a lake or river, rising to the surface to feed in the last light of the day. So the same poem can be read mythically or literally, depending on where we place the pause.

A person new to haiku might want to have it one way or the other. But it doesn’t work like that. The answer is always “all of the above.” The poet’s task is to establish a vector of possible meanings, each of which interacts with the others. The result is a poem we can return to over and over again.

What determines the vector of meaning in a haiku? The poet’s use of the season word is a dominant factor. But phrasing can be just as important. In last month’s Honorable Mentions, everyday expressions like “I’ve had enough!” and “Give it a rest!” inform our reading of each poem.

The same is true of the winning haiku. “To swallow the bait” calls to mind “take the bait,” or possibly “bait and switch.” Not to mention that to swallow something “hook, line, and sinker” is to be fooled completely by a deception or a lie. All of these influence our reading of the poem.

There is something so ominous—and, yes, so “final”—about the image of that gullible, wide-open mouth as the early winter darkness swallows the landscape. Whether it belongs to a fish, a person, a country, or the night itself, we can only shiver in response. The poet doesn’t mention the barbed hook hidden in the bait, but it is there at the heart of the poem.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

i get to do less
now that the day’s had enough
and night comes early

— Nancie Zivetz-Gertler 

night comes early now
giving the sunshine a rest
after so much light

— Susan Bender

♦

You can find more on December’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Winter season word: “Night Comes Early”

night comes earlier
and earlier . . .  finally
all of it is here

As winter approached, a little more darkness was added to each night. Finally, on the night of the solstice, all of it had arrived. I gave an involuntary shiver when I wrote this haiku. Its meaning was darker than I intended. The solstice wanted to show me that darker meaning, so I let it stand.  —Clark Strand

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the winter season word “night comes early.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “night comes early.”

Haiku Tip: Prowl the Leaky Edge of Language!

The haiku form is very simple—just seventeen syllables arranged in a pattern of 5-7-5, including a season word. And yet, as we’ve seen with each month’s challenge, that simple form can express a multitude of meanings. With a little creativity and finesse, we can say almost anything in a haiku. Given that, the question becomes: Where are the best meanings found?

Mediocre haiku come in myriad guises, but they have one thing in common—the use of clichés. The word comes from the French for “stereotype” and, according to Wikipedia, means “an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating.” A cliché is a predictable meaning expressed in unoriginal words.

How do we avoid this in a poetic form that, by virtue of its brevity and relative ease of composition, is particularly vulnerable to unoriginality? So far as I know, there are two principal methods: (1) writing from direct observation, and (2) writing lots and lots of haiku on a given theme until the clichéd meanings are exhausted and we end up with an original poem. 

Every season word is a cliché—an experience shared by generations of people and found to be meaningful in relatively predictable, reliable ways. The problem is that eventually those experiences become too predictable. When that happens, they lose their vitality.

Time turns in a great circle with the yearly passing of the seasons and the world is constantly renewed. But the older a culture or a person gets, the more predictable the world begins to feel. Poets are the rejuvenators of language and, therefore, the resuscitators of the natural world.

As haiku poets, we learn to prowl the limits of a particular season word, exploring its outer edges until we find the place where the fresh meanings are seeping, like water, into the land of what is already known or understood. We may start at the center with entirely conventional or expected meanings, but if we keep spiraling outward, eventually we will find that leaky edge. That is where the good poems live because that is where Life and Nature live.

Our job as haiku poets is to travel to that outer edge and bring a poem back to the center to revitalize the language we think in and use as our principal tool in creating and maintaining the culture in which we live.

A note on night comes early: The season word “night comes early” falls under the broader seasonal topic “shortest day.” That topic includes a variety of additional season words, including “winter solstice” and “early dusk,” each of which has its own unique flavor. “Night comes early” refers to the arrival of night, rather than dusk or twilight, and suggests a transition to darkness that can feel so sudden and irrevocable that it takes us by surprise.