< hot summer >

[milo]

Taken from my comments above:
"Yes, it's not really a haiku. It's a fauxku or a haiku parody
or some such. It's immoral to format twelve or so syllables
into three lines and not label it "fauxku" even though
I'm pretty sure any further dilution of the term "haiku"
would not be scientifically detectable. (Still, that's no excuse.)"

("summer - season word for summer" is intended as a joke)

By the way, haikus do use metaphor. The proscription is that no
direct metaphor be written in the haiku. One obvious example
that appears in almost every haiku is the season word. An example
is "sunflower" which is a metaphor for "summer".

Here are two examples of haiku by Issa that contain metaphor:
(Another misunderstanding about haiku is that they deal only with
woman's/man's connection with nature. The proscription here is that
while they can deal with any subject matter, they must be express
them with references to nature (not completely true, but close).

thorny wild roses
"Step over us here!"
as they bloom

Jean Cholley points out that this haiku carries both literal and symbolic meanings. It appears in Issa's travel diary, Kansei san nen kikô, along with an anecdote. While Issa made his trip home to his native village, he witnessed the guards of the Nakagawa Barrier Gate prevent two women from passing by boat. Literally, the thorny bushes in the haiku impede travelers; symbolically, they are the border guards, agents of the Edo government, who impede the travel of women across provinces. Cholley believes that Issa is speaking ironically when he praises "our magnificent regime" for its laws; En village de miséreux: Choix de poèmes de Kobayashi Issa (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 233, note 4.
http://haikuguy.com/issa/search.php?keyw...er+us+here&year=


the closer I get
to my village, the more pain...
wild roses

In a prescript to this haiku Issa reports that he entered his home village on the morning of Fifth Month, 19th day, 1810. First, he paid his respects at his father's gravesite, and then he met with the village headman. While the content of their meeting is not revealed, it plainly had to do with the matter of the poet's inheritance that his stepmother and half brother had withheld from him for years. He goes on to write, tersely, "After seeing the village elder, entered my house. As I expected they offered me not even a cup of tea so I left there soon." In another text dated that same year, he recopies this "wild roses" haiku and signs it, mamako issa: "Issa the Stepchild." See Issa zenshû (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1976-79) 3.61; 1.424. Shinji Ogawa assisted with the above translation.
http://haikuguy.com/issa/search.php?keyw...+more+pain&year=

Good for you, of course you must be right, you quoted someone. Which. Means everyone else is wrong. I'm sure anyone can do the same sort of thing from sonnets to sestinas, I've seen it said by some poets that a sonnet can be as long or as short as the poet wants as well as a lot of other shite, I don't agree with them either. But that all good.
So far for the newbs who want to do a haiku (according to Ray):

Make it as long or as short as you want, make it about anything you want and use poetic devices when and as you want.

There is no poetry without metaphor. Ever. Just pretty words.