This month, I’m tagging along with Christie, Margaret, Jone, Mary Lee, and other writers to play with poetry for National Poetry Writing Month. I’ll be creating poems using haikubes, metaphor dice, magnet poetry, paint chips and anything else that catches my fancy.
I haven’t had a lot of success so far with the haikubes, so I decided to try writing haiku from paint chips. I have mostly been working with single-color paint chips, so today I added a constraint: I needed to use all of the colors on a multi-color paint card in the haiku. I chose three cards at random. There weren’t always a lot of extra syllables to play with once the paint chip names were incorporated. Paint color names are in bold.
blue hydrangea blooms
against the clear summer sky
soft rococo blue
silent fog conceals
my heart, an artichoke leaf
fresh thyme green thistle
cat’s eye poetry
not yellow or gold: green grape,
lemon grass, spring leaf
the dirigible plum 
I love how paint chip color names push you to a new way of looking at things. My heart, an artichoke leaf.
That artichoke leaf really stumped me. I spent a LONG time trying to work a haiku about an artichoke field but I just couldn’t make it work. So I moved to metaphor, and that did help. At least I was able to write something I could be contentish with!
Interesting! I had never thought about using paint chips, and I am Googling haikubes now… I noticed in your notes you wrote, “don’t say yellow gold.” May I ask why not? Thank you!
That was a first draft line that I discarded in favor of the recrafted second line. The haikubes are very cool but not working that well for me, though I LOVE my metaphor dice!
Love the haiku about your cats’ eye colors.
Fergus’s eyes could be any of those colors!! My cats mostly have yellow and gold eyes, but Fergus has quite green eyes!