Restless day and night
Turning in circles of fear
Gasping for that light
Notes:
The haiku is a three-line Japanese poetry form with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third. The inspiration for this poem came from the idea of a fish struggling out of water. As someone who suffers from anxiety, this is a familiar sensation. You would feel like the day is restless and the night is endless. It’s like going round and round in a circle. It will appear to be an overreaction if you tell someone this is how you feel. The fear of being unable to accomplish things you would have done if given the right circumstances, such as the fish swimming freely and indefinitely if the circumstance differed from being out of water. In the last line, I stressed: “gasping for that light” rather than “gasping for that air” to underline that we are talking about a person, not a fish.