UPDATE: Cleverhood is giving away one of their awesome high-performance street capes to the writer of a randomly selected haiku! (Might we suggest something about the bittersweet beauty of a bike ride in the rain…?)

Original post: It’s April, folks, and you know what that means (no, we’re not referring to the exciting climax of March Madness or the return of “Game of Thrones,” though a few of us here at Bike New York are kind of excited about those, too): it’s National Poetry Month!

To celebrate, we’re having a bike haiku (a.k.a. “baiku”) contest. Just in case you forgot everything you learned in 4th grade, a haiku is a traditional Japanese poetic form consisting of three lines of verse, with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 again in the third (17 syllables total). An example:

I like riding bikes
and writing poetry, but
not at the same time.

To participate, all you have to do is write a “baiku”—or two, or 10!—and email it to bikehaiku@bike.nyc. Everyone who submits a baiku will be entered into a random drawing for some rad Bike New York schwag, and at the end of the month, we’ll pick our favorites—did you know we have a poet-in-residence here at Bike New York?—and share them with the world. Go forth and compose!

illustration credit: Aaron Kuehn