Haiku About Regret

Regret haiku live among ordinary objects. Cynthia Sharp naps in the clean laundry, wishing there had been children, and the last line adds THE QUIET OF THE SNOW HAVING FALLEN. The quiet is the poem’s whole answer. Thomas Dollbaum goes at the idea with courtesy. The speaker asks a stranger to TELL SPRING that the love was dear, but the closing FALL IS AWAITING makes the message late. Nobody shouts in these poems. Regret is quiet and domestic, and it likes small objects.

A joke with a sting

Connor Bjotvedt writes to a wilted daylily, still soft, with an apology for its passing and the confession I SHOULD HAVE EATEN YOU. The tone is comic. The feeling is real, and the poem shows how a small missed chance can stand in for a larger one. A flower is a good object for regret because it expires on a schedule, and nobody can argue with the date.

What was left undone

Bruce Levine’s TOO MANY DAYDREAMS end with the speaker still at the doorstep of life and NOTHING REALIZED. Gabrielle Bernier turns the question outward: THE DEEP SCARS I LEFT YOU WITH, then, DO YOU CARRY MINE? The question is the poem. Gabrielle DeStefano gives regret a lesson in three short moves: finding and losing, letting go and holding on, and then the single word DIFFERENTIATE, which reads like an instruction to someone who has not yet learned the difference.

Questions readers ask

How is regret different from grief?

Grief is about what happened to you. Regret is about what you did or did not do. The grief page looks at loss, and this page is about the road not taken and the word not said. Grief and regret often arrive together, which is why a few of the poems here sit close to the loss poems.

More themes to read

HeartbreakMemoryTime and AgingLoss and GriefIdentity and SelfAll themes

Last reviewed November 2026. Poems are the work of the poets credited and link to their pages in the original issues.