giggling dragonflies on sidewalk grass having a moment

Written on October 8, 2026

Notes

There is a break after giggling; the possibility of finding that break and not finding it is what makes the haiku interesting in my opinion. The version before I turned the haiku into a one-line haiku was this:

giggling kids…
dragonflies on sidewalk grass
having a moment

But giggling kids completes the image too fully for my liking. While there are some things left in the haiku still to be filled in by the reader, it doesn’t offer re-readability, which a haiku on a subject and scene like this begs for. And even adults giggle at scenes like this, so I took away the identifier altogether and created a bit of ambiguity by turning it into a one-line haiku that would first read giggling dragonflies, demanding the reader to re-read the poem once more to see if there’s more to it than anthropomorphised dragonflies doing it in public.