You may be familiar with our weekly Word of the Day (WotD) Perfect Tweet challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog. This week for National Haiku Poetry Day, we invite you to tweet the words of the day in haiku, or twaiku, as some might say.

As you know, a haiku is a Japanese form of poetry made up of “three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, traditionally invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons.” The word comes from the Japanese hai, “amusement,” plus ku, “sentence.” A senryu is a haiku that’s humorous or satirical, and is named for poet Senryu Karai who popularized the genre in the 18th century.

We love this haiku from Japanese Zen poet Matsuo Basho:

The temple bell stops.
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

If you can fit your haiku in one tweet, great! If not, we ask that you number your tweets for easy reading. And of course you have the option to use this week’s words in regular sentences too if you’re not a poet and you know it.

Happy haiku-ing!