NPR wants your Twitter poetry. Calm yourself.

That insatiable desire to yawn you just felt by reading the letters "NPR" is a natural reaction to the hushed, baby-whisper, dulcet voices that come from their on-air personalities.

Now, to really amp the excitement level, NPR wants your poetry in honor of National Poetry Month. Not just any poetry, though. They only want Twitter poetry. NPR even has firm ground rules, including that you can't write an epic poem and take a photo of it as an attachment, nor can you involve art in your work. They only want 140 characters of poetry--in essence, a haiku.

To submit a poem via Twitter, they've given it the hashtag #NPRpoetry, which is almost as sleep-inducing a hashtag as their on-air programming.

Somewhere, the great haiku writer Matsuo Basho just passed out from boredom. And that's sad, as he's been dead for hundreds of years.

The Friday Poem: Three Haiku, by Matsuo Basho

As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.

Like these three haiku:


The Banana Tree, by Matsuo Basho

The banana tree
blown by winds pours raindrops
into the bucket


On The Cow Shed, by Matsuo Basho

On the cow shed
A hard winter rain;
Cock crowing


Wrapping Dumplings, by Matsuo Basho

Wrapping dumplings in
bamboo leaves, with one finger
she tidies her hair