A haiku looks like the easiest poem to write. Three short lines, a few syllables, finished before your tea goes cold. That apparent simplicity is exactly why this format works so well for writing about the climate crisis, and why it is where I send researchers who tell me they cannot write poetry.
Before you write one, it helps to unlearn the rule you were taught at school.
Most of us were told a haiku has three lines of five, seven and five syllables. In English, that is a myth. Japanese counts a unit called the mora (in haiku circles, the on), which behaves differently from a syllable. “Tokyo” is two syllables to my northern English ear and four morae in Japanese. Anyone who insists on a strict 17-syllable count is being a pedant. Aim for 17 syllables or fewer, then stop counting and start noticing.
A haiku includes four things. The poem must be about nature. If it turns out to be about human nature, you have written a senryū, which is a fine thing, just a different one.
Every haiku carries a kigo, a single seasonal reference: a flower, a fruit, an animal, a festival that fixes the poem in one season.
A haiku is written in the present tense, a snapshot, roughly a live photo of the world, or about as long as it takes me to fall off my chair. And, at its best, it has a kireji, a cutting word that pivots the poem. English has no cutting words, so we make the turn with punctuation, or with a plain contrast between one image and another.
Why the haiku suits the climate crisis
That final ingredient, the turn, is the reason the haiku is so well suited to climate. A haiku builds a scene and then breaks it. Things are one way, and then they are another. Climate change has exactly that shape, which means the form itself can carry the science.
Here is one of mine, written about the American pika, a small mountain mammal that has died out across a 165km² stretch of California’s northern Sierra Nevada as temperatures have risen and snowpack has fallen.
Balanced on a rock
orange sneezeweed in your mouth;
you drop in the heat.
Look at how little it has to do. Orange sneezeweed is the kigo, a wildflower the pika gathers and dries in the sun. The tense is present, so we are with the animal as it feeds. The semicolon is the cutting point. Before it, a creature is alive and busy. After it, the creature is gone, undone by heat it cannot escape. The poem never mentions degrees or decades. The form delivers the loss for you.
The same trick works in either direction. You could write the turn the other way, from a damaged world to a recovering one, for a poem about the ozone layer healing, or a river coming back to life.
The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.
Why bother, when you could write a paper?
Because a poem reaches people a paper never will, and reaches a different part of them. British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called poetry “a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”.
A haiku holds that mirror up to a warming world and asks the reader to look again at something they had stopped seeing. Science does not hold the only licence on knowledge, and a researcher who can move a reader as well as inform one is a more powerful communicator for it.
There is a deeper reason too. The kigo assumes the seasons stay where we left them. As the climate shifts, they do not. Researchers who have analysed decades of English-language haiku have found the seasonal markers themselves starting to slip, blossom arriving early, snow arriving late. The form that was built to fix a season is now quietly recording its disruption.
Now write one
Pick a piece of research, yours or someone else’s. Find the living thing at the heart of it. Give it a season, put it in the present, and find the moment everything turns. You will probably have a draft inside five minutes, which is about how long it takes the researchers in my workshops.
If you are an academic in the UK or Ireland, The Conversation’s Climate Poetry Award is open until September 1 2026: a climate poem of three to 40 lines, plus 250 words on the research behind it. Write the haiku first. Then see what else poetry is willing to do for your science.
