November Chapbook Challenge 2021: Haiku Edition

 Once again I did participate in this year's November Poem-a-day Chapbook Challenge hosted by Robert Lee Brewer on the Poetic Asides website. Although for me it's not usually as intensive as the April Poem-a-day challenge, I try to get involved each year with varying degrees of success. The object is to have enough poems (preferably with a unifying theme) by the end of the month to publish a chapbook. Robert announces winners based to their manuscript submissions but does not publish them. That task is up to the individual poet. My best success was when I wrote poems with a baseball theme in November 2013, which turned into my 2016 chapbook, Hits and Sacrifices, published by Finishing Line Press. I also have submitted a manuscript based on the pandemic-themed poems I wrote last November, in a form called the hay(na)ku. That's been submitted for publication, and if accepted, will probably come out next year. 

This year I wrote 38 haiku and senryu on a general theme of November and autumn. I tried to stick to Robert's daily prompts, at least tangentally. I doubt they will turn into a chapbook, but for what it's worth, here are some of what I think are the best ones I wrote this past month:

[Day 1: write a "correspondence" poem]

Dear November,

thanks for the feathery frost 

paintings on my car

[Day 4: write a "party" poem]

dancing on cold feet -
who invited foggy breath
to this party?

[Day 7: write a "health" poem"]

I'm out of the woods

healthy once again, but now

the leaves are dying

[Day 8, first day of Standard Time: write a poem with the title "______ of the _______." I used the phrase in my first line.]

first day of the change -
we wound all the clocks backward -
where did the sun go?

[Day 11, Veteran's Day: write a "memory" poem]

leaves cascade to ground
as I stop to remember
all of the fallen

[Day 14: write a poem with the title "______ That." I used the phrase in my first line.]

who would have thought that
she'd be in the food bank line
for a free turkey

[Day 19: write a "future" poem]

wild turkeys wander

while their cousins on the farm

face a bleak future

[Day 22: write an animal poem.]

brown rabbit
standing, ears at attention
senses winter

[Day 24: write a "response" poem. This was a kind of response to my own haiku from Day 21.]

handing out hot meals,

angels in the soup kitchen -

cornucopia

[Day 27: write a "remix" poem. I wrote seven haiku that used words I previously used in other haiku this month. This one reused the words "foggy" and "umbrella."]

foggy morning -
I hold up an umbrella
as if it would help