Thanks to Dave Bonta for sharing his brilliant photo haiku on his Woodrat photoblog, I was inspired to play around with this image. There was a real nip in the air on Wednesday afternoon which created frost ferns on the Velux windows in our kitchen. I stood underneath and took some photos, and although it wasn’t dark outside and there was plenty of light, the flash kept going off, so I assumed all I’d get was a blur. In fact, I got these finely beaded images, frost ferns pearled with light from the flash, almost like underwater photos of coral. It was the sub-aqua atmosphere that gave me the word ‘surfacing’, and originally I had ‘frost ferns’ in the poem, but that seemed too obvious, so I was left with what appears above. Looking at Dave’s work, maybe I could have been a bit more adventurous with the font, but it was a fine line between foregrounding the font/ text or the image. Either way, I enjoyed the process. Thanks Woodrat!
Julie Mellor - poet 
Hey, glad to hear I helped spark this! Thanks for the shout-out and the link. This is so much stronger without the words “frost ferns” – by avoiding that redundancy with the image, it seems as if the haiga-making process has left you with a stronger haiku. (My biggest reason for opposing 17-syllable orthodoxy is that so often English-langauge haiku of that length have one to three words too many. I saw an example of this just yesterday, a friend posting an otherwise good haiku referring to “wild birds” rather than just “birds” and it came across to me as closed rather than open.)
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Hi Dave,
Yes, you’re absolutely right. The photo shows frost ferns, so there’s no need to say it. It’s often hard to cut something from a short poem, and I agree that the 5-7-5 ‘rule’ can be misleading. Then there’s the question of posting it, and whether it’s ready. When I was writing longer poems I would often wait months before posting them, even years sometimes. With haiku though, there’s a sense that they’re of the moment. So, with this little poem, I felt I had to get it on the blog before the snow started to thaw!
Looking forward to more Woodrat haiga.
Julie x
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