Haiku: A Syllable Dilemma

Warm Saturday night

Neighbors party raucously --

I work quietly.

This is my first attempt at writing a Haiku, a traditional Japanese poetry form. As I have often said, I can’t rhyme to save my life. So here is an alternate form of poetry for people like me. YAY!

So how does a Haiku work, you ask. Oh well, it is a three line poem, which is usually divided in two parts using a colon or a dash. While both sections must enrich the other, they should be independent of each other. Usually, each Haiku contains a season word as cherry blossoms indicate spring, snow indicate winter, and mosquitoes indicate summer. 

That’s the easy part.

The difficult part is that each line of Haiku has to have certain number of syllables. So instead of rhyming, it’s syllable counting. The total number of syllables in a Haiku must be 17. The first line of the Haiku should have 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables, and the third line 5 syllables.

So what do you think? Any Haiku expert out there? Or, a syllable expert?

P.S.: I used a syllable counter for this one. Not that I don’t know how to count syllables. It’s just that English is a funny language, and my second language. So I would like to be extra sure.