Wilson Classes Explore Traditional Japanese Poetry

Volume 1; Issue 2; April 2nd, 2019

Many exciting projects are in progress at Wilson High School but we often don’t see the fruits of our labor publicly displayed. One of the projects students enjoyed this semester was in Ms.Lee’s writing seminar classes, where students were assigned a traditional Japanese poem or Haiku. The students were told to base their haiku on nature from trees, oceans, flowers etc. Students had to use their creativity to create five stanzas on the topic of nature they chose. Students also had to create an image on which to display their haiku. Students worked hard to formulate poetry, as well as draw and color an image to make their haiku the best. The following four are ones that really stood out.

In this first haiku, the student describes flowers, showing appreciation for both the meaning and fragrance of the blossoms.

In this haiku, the student describes the loneliness and isolation of the desert, ending with the vision of death.

The next haiku highlights the feelings that may arise when we experience the changing seasons as flowers wax and wane. The student describes The beauty of cherry blossoms, giving anyone who reads it a vision of a cherry blossom.

For this haiku titled “Kill Crop,” the student writes about tobacco, describing the process from growing it, creating it into what we know as cigarettes. It is a powerful statement about the harmful reality of cigarettes.