For the last eight weeks, Civil Beat’s inbox has been pinging day and night with some unusual messages for an accountability-focused newsroom to receive: poems celebrating — and sometimes roasting — the diverse neighborhoods we call home.
Since launching this year’s Neighborhood Haiku competition at the end of October, we’ve received roughly 350 submissions from readers around the state. The contest, which Civil Beat first held in 2019, puts a local twist on the traditional Japanese poem structure by asking readers to use the five digits of their ZIP code as the syllable count for each line.
The poems we’ve received have been, by turns, beautiful, humorous, insightful, even funny. Together, they are a celebration of the islands’ past and present.
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