Cold full moon

oo…oh…

a snowy owl. 

_{*Snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) in Saunders County, Nebraska just before the Solstice. Photo by Kirby Zicafoose. Lune by Jack Phillips.}

A lune? Winter is given to spare poetry and for this haiku is perfect. A lune is an American form of haiku and like other variants, it seeks to express the simplicity of the Japanese form in American idiom. We love to write them. A lune can follow a 5/3/5 pattern or 3/5/3; sometimes words are counted as in the method developed by beat-poet Jack Collom. The original form developed by poet Robert Kelly counts syllables. The wild poets in our coterie are less interested in counting and more concerned with shape and feel — the lines should make a crescent waxing or waning and the arc of the syllables should conform easily with a moonish sigh: oh… see the moon? oo… an owl!