‘Look around, look around you,’ Eliza Hamilton’s song to her husband Alexander Hamilton is one of my current earworms — along with many others from Hamilton, the energetic, intelligent, amazing musical. Look around. Some of us are emerging from corona virus lockdown, our senses newly raw to the wider world. So you might think today’s tweeted haiku is current, what with so many cafes still sadly closed.

closed café
emerald grass grows
in the awning gutter

But, honest guv, I wrote it in 2008. I don’t know how others do it, but when I scrawl a possible haiku, I write the date. And when I get to typing it, I make a brief note of the circumstance when the haiku occurred. In this case: 6/9/08, Kew Road en route to Richmond.

After one rejection (though actually in haiku-world it’s not really rejection; more like non-acceptance), I got round to sending it out again four years later. The British Haiku Society journal Blithe Spirit published it in summer 2012, bless! And I chose to put it in my 2020 retrospective haiku book The Walk Home

So, a bit raw, newly tuned to the strangeness of things, use this time. Look around.

The photo was taken along Chiswick Mall in October 2016. This turns out to be a time travel blogpost.