another frog haiku

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Margaret at Reflections on the Teche for Roundup.

ICYMI: The good humans over at DiverseVerse hosted a cover reveal for For the Win: Poems About Phenomenal Athletes, selected by Irene Latham and Charles Waters, coming March 3, 2026 from Lerner Publishing. Each of these poems highlights a moment in the life of a contemporary athlete, from growing up to setbacks to successes to legacies and more! And we worked with quite a few new-to-us poets, and we can't wait for you to get to know their work!

Also: this is early, but NCTE has been on my mind this week, as my plans for Denver are firming up. If you, too, will be attending the conference, please come to the Poetry Peeps Meet-Up!

I woke up wanting to write a haiku—no doubt because I am updating my haiku workshop slides. :) I was thinking about the brilliance of the famous frog/old pond haiku by Basho, and had been reading this article that shares five different ways the poem has been translated. 

So I browsed the National Gallery of Art's Picasso collection, looking for something haiku-worthy, and lo, a frog!

 I downloaded the image and started thinking about what sense other than sound I might focus on...which led me down some frog holes, but then I thought: how can I play with sound, but differently than Basho? That led me to this article about frog sounds.

However, I was most captivated by Picasso's rendering of the leaping frog's wild eyes. I pondered: What's this frog feeling, thinking?

Eventually I landed in silence, which feels like the perfect place for an introverted poet. :)

raucous spring pond

frog croaks too much, too much

dives into silence

- Irene Latham

Click here for another (hopeful, singing) frog haiku I wrote during ArtSpeak: ANIMALS. Thanks so much for reading!