Observe One Object for Ten Seconds

There is a stretch of attention between “I saw a tree” and “a small snail shell caught in a crack of wet bark.” To gain concrete imagery, haiku observation must go beyond naming an object and notice the particular condition in which that object exists now.

Choose one thing and look at it for exactly ten seconds. For the first three seconds, notice its overall shape. For the next three, find the smallest difference or irregularity. During the final four, watch something that changes with time—light, movement, sound. If touching is appropriate, temperature and texture can also be part of observation.

Then write facts before judgments. “An old umbrella” is less specific than “the black coating on the handle worn away only where the thumb rests.” That one detail can show years of use without explaining them.

Careful observation is not the same as listing everything. Instead of putting ten features into a poem, select the one or two that make this object unmistakably itself today. Haiku compression is not merely the skill of reducing what you saw; it is the skill of choosing what is alive among what you saw.