[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by alanX

For a start... kono shi or kono wa shi would be proper context.

What the heck is "kono wa shi"?

This poem I write to you,
It seems all that I can do,
To show you how much I care,
To you I lay my heart bare.

I tried to keep the rhyming, but it's not doable. I'd suggest to go for a real nice haiku. It'd be fitting. Something like

黒滝や
影水が降る
白い首

くろだきや
かげみずがふる
しろいくび

A black waterfall
The shadow-water falls
A white neck

Feels kinda erotic to me, and the girl of course has to be Japanese (this must be true, why else are you writing a Valentines poem in a language you clearly don't speak?) and have a pretty fair complexion, but it's meant as an example.

Plus, I've never been a haiku-writer, and especially not one at 2 am, so take it with a grain of salt. But here's my thoughts on what I wrote

#1 Haiku technically have to have a reference to nature. Mine does.
#2 There's supposed to be a "turn" where the poem surprises the reader and leads them to contemplation. Mine is intended to do this with the morphing of a discussion of a waterfall with a metaphor about hair being a cascade of dark water.
#3 I've used the oft-used や in its (what I believe to be) correct haiku usage—as a way to mark the subject of the haiku. At least, I think that's what や is used for in haiku.
#4 The poor form of using "water" twice doesn't show up in the original Japanese.
#5 I was really hoping to use 真っ白 in the last line, but chose not to violate the 5-7-5 rule; also, I didn't know if 真っ白首 would look odd to a Japanese eye.

Now I'm missing a kigo, and I'm not sure if my use of や is a true kireji or not, but whatever.

Native Japanese speakers, please feel free to chime in. I might send this to my girlfriend (who hates the fact that I left her for a year in Japan!) just for grins soon. As a non-native, I've definitely got no way of judging the haiku for anything other than a basic "did I use words right" level.