Daily Haiku, Oct 20, 2026

There's something charming in the mismatch at the heart of this one: a forest giraffe, an image that shouldn't quite work, since giraffes belong to open savanna, not trees and shade. That small wrongness gives the poem its dreamlike pull, like something glimpsed at the edge of sleep. The opening word "come" acts as a quiet summons, and then the poem pivots away from the image entirely into something more abstract: fate, timing, certainty. That's the turn — from a single strange creature to a meditation on meeting and waiting. The mood sits somewhere between patience and longing, unhurried but sure of itself. Repetition of "meet" across the final lines isn't clumsy so much as incantatory, like a promise spoken twice to make it true. The compression works by refusing to explain why the giraffe matters, which is exactly what invites a second read — you return not for answers but for the feeling of being called toward something inevitable.