In elementary school, Valentine’s Day was a big affair. The days approaching the holiday were spent crafting our Valentine mailboxes and taping the brown paper lunch bags, waxy with emphatic Crayola hearts, around the border of the room. The next day, we’d slip drugstore Valentines and chocolates into everyone’s mailboxes and take home enough brightly wrapped and highly processed sugar to make our mothers nervous.
Since elementary school, Valentine’s Day has matured (though admittedly I sometimes miss the simplicity of the paper-bag mailboxes and the cardinal rule of elementary-school V-Day: if you’re handing out Valentines, everyone gets one); the chocolate has gotten infinitely better. We’re able to express ourselves more eloquently, too: Last spring, we asked our readers to wax poetic (and romantic) about why they loved eating in Brooklyn. We received a flood of haikus — a Japanese style of poetry composed of three lines of five syllables, seven syllables and five syllables again. Readers mused about rooftop gardens, farmers markets, the Brooklyn Bridge and the food-and-drink artisans that help making living and eating here so satisfying.
Today, we’re sharing some of our favorites of the haikus we received — 14 of them, to be exact. Here are the poems that made us feel the warm-fuzziest about eating well in the sweet, funky borough we call home.
Feeling inspired? Share a haiku of your own in the comments and check out our slide show — you can save and share your favorite meme over social media.
Illustrations by: Chloe Hoeg
