Writing poetry

To all of those who know how to write poems, I need some help and advice. See, a friend has ask me to help her with some poetry assignments. I am not very good at poetry. Her teacher asked her to write eight different poems about different topics and she has to write eight journal entries as reactions to them. The teacher wants her to write three different formats. Haiku, Thyme, and free write. Can any of you give me some samples of the three formats. Thanks! I would really appreciate a response by tomorrow morning so that I can help her with them.

Nena, your friend should really ask her teacher for help, that is what teachers are for. But typically Haiku is a set of 3 lines that lead the reader into a visual representation of a picture, without actually putting great detail into the words. You need to have about 5 syllables by the time you are done with it. Here is an example


Lightning:

Heron's cry

Stabs the darkness


As far as Thyme? The only thyme I know about is the kind that grows in the garden, did you perhaps mean rhyme? Sort of like Mother Goose nursery rhymes and books by Dr. Suess? Free form is hard to describe but I will try. It is typically 8-10 lines of difficult not simplistic verse. It usually does not rhyme, but it paints a picture for the reader to follow in their mind's eye, again like a haiku it leads the reader to their own conculusion without actually drawing a map with the words. Does this make any sense to you? Your best bet is to just use a search engine and go on the Internet and research it that way. Either that or ask the teacher or go to the library. Good luck

I think there might be different formats for haiku? I remember it being a 5-7-5 pattern. It's 3 lines, it has a nature image in it, and it's supposed to suggest a mood. One of mine:

The patient white cat
Watches butterflies tumble
Past the window screen

or

Why do the sprinklers
Endlessly water pavement?
It will never grow


Blank verse or free verse has no rhyme scheme or rhythm. It almost looks like regular speech except it is somehow more poetic. Here is an example from e.e. cummings:


in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee


Or this one from William Carlos Willams, apparently from a actual note he left someone he was visiting that seemed poetic in retrospect:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


I don't know what you mean by "thyme", need some clarification on that.