Normally I don’t like to share my haiku with my husband. It’s not that I’m afraid of his judgement, exactly. It’s more that the stuff scribbled in my personal notebooks is mostly just private. It hasn’t been edited, and it’s not publication-worthy, so why would I let someone else see it?

But this morning he said to me, “I liked the haiku in your notebook.” To which I replied suspiciously, “Which haiku?” I had forgotten I’d left the notebook open to a list I’d been making. There were, to my horror, two haiku on the opposite page. And he had read them.

“They were cute!” he said.

One was a kind of inside joke, commenting on a grocery list I’d started which he had hijacked with a note-to-self reminding him to get a friend’s email address. It read:

“Milk, lettuce, VLAD“
reads the list.
I wonder where one
can pick up a VLAD these days.

Fine. It’s silly, it made him laugh. But I still hadn’t really intended it for public consumption.

“I liked the one about Ned,” he added. I had been writing poems about our new kitten. Some of them were incredibly sappy, and I cringed.

Luckily it wasn’t one of the cheesy ones. This one read:

Moonlight Sonata
kitten soothed by foot odors—
tennis shoe, waiting.

Actually, in my original draft I’d written “wafting” as the last word. My husband was offended by the suggestion that his tennis shoes wafted, so I changed it to his interpretation of my terrible handwriting, which was waiting. I guess that’s a bit more mysterious and therefore better.

What do you think?

I wrote a few more about Ned. I don’t want to bore you with haiku about my cat, since that seems a bit Crazy Cat Lady, but this is pretty much my favorite: