The ladies who meet regularly in a museum cafe in Cologne skip the gossip and get straight down to haiku, an ultra brief poetry style that has spread from Japan around the globe.

Cologne's haiku workshop, held at the Museum of East Asian Art, often has up to 10 amateurs eager to read their latest poetry in German, a language of long words where it can often be a squeeze to distill an idea into such brief poems.

Traditional Japanese haikus are supposed to be composed of just 17 syllables, "as short as a single breath," arranged in three lines and including a "kigo": some word suggesting a season of the year.

A haiku does not rhyme or have a special intonation pattern like poetry in other traditions.

A typical haiku by classic author Issa is rendered in English as: my dear old village / every memory of home / pierces like a thorn.

Every child in Japan knows the centuries-old syllable pattern of 5-7-5, and writing haikus is a popular pastime.

In other languages which have caught the haiku bug, the rules are often looser but the spirit remains.

Writing haikus in German 

"A haiku is a seasonal poem that does not describe the poet's own feelings but a mood, based on something seen in nature," explains Martin Berner, chairman of the Frankfurt-based German Haiku Society.

"In German, you can't get as much content into 17 syllables as you might in English," he said, referring to the many multi-syllabic words of German.

German haiku poets were split as to whether to preserve the strict 17-syllable pattern or give themselves greater artistic license.

Berner supports a liberal approach to both content and form, so as give German haiku poets the maximum creative scope.

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