Continuing to work on "Ancient Oak"
Monday, August 18, 2025In my recent haiku post I started drafting a poem about an ancient oak, but wasn't quite happy with it. Since I started show its development on the blog, I thought I'd continue polishing it here.
The initial idea was
ancient oak
overhead, the chirping
of power lines
This poem is in "fragment + phrase" form, probably the most common structure for a haiku. The two contrasting images are that of an ancient oak tree and noisy power lines. So these are basic ingredients I'm working with. However, I didn't like having a comma in line 2, and wanted to give a sense of time as well as place.
The next iteration was
ancient oak at dawn
the air fills with the chirping
of power lines
But I felt this was too much of a mouthful and not very rhythmic.
I next tried a one-line format
ancient oak filling the sky chirping power lines
Which is kind of nice, but I don't like the repeated "-ing" sound in filling and chirping. My next idea was to make the connection with birdsong more explicit by introducing a bird:
old oak at dawn
a bird sings along with the chirping
of power lines
Again, I felt this was getting a bit wordy and busy, but I liked how introducing a character, the bird, made it feel quite immediate and active. I changed ancient to old to try to reign in the syllables slightly. So now I was looking for a way to explicitly introduce a bird in a less wordy way. I settled for changing the fragment and phrase parts entirely:
dawn chorus
over the old oak
chirping power lines
The last line, I'm unsure whether I want "chirping power lines" or "power lines chirp". The latter is shorter and more immediate as it uses the active voice. But I don't like the sound "chirp" makes at the end of the line, it's not a very pretty sound in my opinion. I like the subtle alliteration of the second line — these devices are okay in haiku so long as they are not distracting.
This is where I've settled so far. If you have opinions on which ideas work best, I'm interested to hear them.