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Share Your Pandemic Haiku

Get creative with poetry about your experiences during the past year

A newspaper headline about haiku

Whether small things like participating in Zoom meetings or deeper experiences such as being unable to see loved ones, we’ll all take away something notable after a year of living and working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To help celebrate International Haiku Poetry Day on April 17, we invite Duke staff and faculty  to tap into their creative side and share experiences using the Japanese poetry form of Haiku – three-line poems using a structure of five syllables, seven syllables and five syllables. Poems can be about any of your moments, feelings or experiences – large or small – that meant something to you during the pandemic.

We’ll share some poems in an upcoming Working@Duke story, and we’ll give away some “Proud to be Working@Duke” T-shirts.

Send your poem to working@duke.edu by 5 p.m. on April 5 and provide your name, department, and phone number.

Here are three Haiku examples to get you going.

--

My quiet iron.

Left alone for a full year.

I don’t fear wrinkles.

--

No fever. No aches.

Click no new symptoms today.

SymMon says I’m good.

--

First dose goes in arm.

In just a few weeks, I can

Do things that I love.