What's so damn difficult about haiku anyways?

Someone once asked me why do I need so much time, 2-3hrs at least, to write one short haiku. Well, you'd think I could manage to put something together quicker than that - I mean, even I think I should be able to waste less time on a few syllables. And given that I've only started writing them I mainly follow only 3 rules:

1. The form should be 5-7-5 syllables
2. There should be a kigo (季語, seasonal reference word)
3. There should a be a kire (切れ, a break that kind of stops the flow of the haiku)

Shouldn't be that difficult, eh? And given that even the kigo are given for each week, there shouldn't be anything holding me back from writing tons of haiku on 3 subjects...

Wrong.

First of all it's exactly the limited subjects that make it less easy. If I see a butterfly I can't choose it for a topic and make a haiku out of it. Well, of course I could and probably also should, but for the purposes of the haikukai the butterfly would be totally useless. On the contrary, I must think of the given subjects and find an image or feeling related to them and work on that. For example this weeks words are 夏の山　サングラス　どくだみ (summer mountains, sunglasses and some kind of small summer weed) - obviously as I have no idea what the last one is it's very difficult to write anything about it, so I'm concentrating on the 2 previous ones. An additional difficulty when composing haiku with japanese people is that the situation has to be something they can relate to. It happened to me once that I just couldn't get the feeling I had in mind explained to our haiku sensei, because the idea behind it is what I call "too finnish". (This has happened in our japanese class too - all the 3 Finns understood what my sentence meant, but the teacher just couldn't see what I was after...)

But, let's pretend that I have the idea for sunglasses. I don't usually look very stylish nor in fashion, but for some reason my sunglasses are big and stylish, decorated with small gems, so that they alone kind of upgrade my image a few pegs towards looking like a fashionable person. Now, how to say all this in 5-7-5?

サングラス is a bit difficult in that it's a long kigo, already 5 syllables in itself. Another problem is that I'd very much like to attach it to a verb, kakeru (wear sunglasses), which would make it even longer. The fact that it's 5 syllables, would make it a perfect word for the 1st line, because it would create a kire by itself, as in "sunglasses - ....", but for somehow I find that the effect is way harder to pull off with sunglasses than when using a "nature" word like summer rain, 夏の雨 (夏の雨　隣の猫も　かわいそう summer rain - even the neighbour's cat looks sad/pitiful).

So, after reading other haiku with the same kigo, I decided to just put it on the last line like many others have done, and hope that the kire and rhytm go ok.

What about the rest, then? I work some more with the idea of the haiku - it's the feeling when you look in a mirror wearing the sunglasses and notice that you look different - more like someone rich and important. I come up with 鏡の中の　素敵な女優 "the cool actress reflected in the mirror", but the problem is that the first line is overflowing with 7 syllables - so I try to cut it down to 鏡で "in the mirror". Now it's one syllable short, so I decide to use the older form of で, にて to create some length, and voila, here we have one possible line: 鏡にて

Now for the middle line. 素敵な女優 would be ok for it's length, but there's something that I don't quite like, so I'll try to change the "actress" to "star" 素敵なスター. I think it works a bit better, but yet... I could also try to change "cool" for "elegant" and try it with the actress: 上品の女優, but it doesn't really work either (plus it would give me 8 syllables for the middle line). I tried also to take the sunglasses on the middle line, which would give me 鏡にて　サングラス掛け, but that's even worse than the previous ones.

You see a pattern here? I'm just trying to find the least bad option among many... *g*

So by now my other haiku for next wednesday looks like this:
鏡にて　素敵なスター　サングラス - In the mirror a cool actress: sunglasses

It works a bit better in japanese than in english IMO, but I'm still wondering whether the kire between the 2nd and the 3rd lines is strong enough... Well, if it isn't, I trust that Maruyama-san and Nakazono-san will show me how this should be done. That's what sensei are for, right? :)

And mind you that this is just a very rough way of working and I learn new things every week listening to them. Small things like that the ending -かな should be used only in the 3rd line (I had put it on the 1st line as in 梅雨入りかな, which would be better as 梅雨入りして), that it's better to use -て than -た forms for verb endings, since -た is too explanatory (so it should be 巻きつけて instead of 巻きつけた), that it's better to express a feeling related to a scene instead of just producing a description etc... I'm always looking forward to their corrections. Sometimes they work on it over the week, sometimes I get the corrected version straight away.

I also try to read the haiku that others have written on the same kigo, but I still find them very difficult to understand without someone explaining them to me. I like more writing my own, as bad as they might be. As I mentioned before, all this teaches me a new way to look around me and notice the season. I also learn new fancy words with which to impress unsuspecting japanese. Well, impressing japanese isn't that hard to begin with, since even using a word like tsuyu, the rainy season (literally "plum rains" 梅雨, one of my favorite words even though I find the season itself hard to handle. Poetic though it might be, it's a completely normal word to use), makes the japanese go "ooh". But if you upgrade a bit and mention tsuiri (梅雨入り), the poetic word for the start of tsuyu, and on the top of knowing the word pronounce it correctly (not tsuyuiri but tsuiri, dropping away the yu-sound from the middle)... Me 1 - Japanese 0. *g*