This one is an homage to the Japanese tradition of haiku, a form that Billy Collins is quite familiar with. For those of you who are not poets by trade, a haiku is (typically) a three line poem with the first & third lines consisting of five syllables each and the middle line consisting of seven. As the attached article states, it is allowable to tinker with this rule, although I’m not the one to do that. Unlike the rhyme and meter rules that govern the sonnet, I like the original 5-7-5 structure of the haiku. Anyway, that’s a very long intro into a very short poem...
Winter Haiku
It is Winter, Friend,
and the trees have been stripped down
to their naked selves.
