I didn't even consider the double meaning of "coming down". Very good! We could play with formatting more.
evening snow
coming
down
my son snoring
So many possibilities!
It goes the other way too, right? Many Japanese words are 5 mora or more. Katatsumuri, for instance. Only one or two syllables in English, depending on the accent you are picturing as you write it ("snal" or "snA-ul"), but five morae, taking up the entire first or last clause.
In Japanese I kind of like the limit of 5-7-5. It makes it something of a puzzle and helps guide me in my word choice. If I were more fluent I may feel otherwise. But in English I find it far too constraining.
I hadn’t thought about words like katatsumori. 🤣
I haven’t ever tried to write haiku in Japanese, so I hadn’t really considered how the language might constrain the writer as it sometimes does in English.
Since reading this comment two days and being taken aback by the reformatting that you did of the poem about your son’s snoring, I’ve been looking at a lot of English haiku and finding all kinds of different formatting examples.
One that I particularly liked was a single line haiku that used a double or triple space between words to make a line break. I thought that was pretty clever.
dry leaves scattered across a road is there a pattern