Feb. 5, 2010

I LOVE YOU:
she will tell me
but I can't

From a culture where men rarely express their affections verbally, Atsushi Iida fears Valentine's Day in America. His lover is sure to give him chocolates and whisper in his ear. Capitalized, these three words of endearment sound as if they are shouted. Perhaps he can return her favors with a haiku poem? A Ph.D. candidate at a university in Pennsylvania, Iida's dissertation compares haiku by native and non-native speakers of English in the Asahi Haikuist Network, noting the rhetorical differences between the two groups of poets. He hopes to identify how the structure of haiku, the process of composing haiku, and the social function of sharing haiku assist in the writing of academic English.

Bruce Ross in Maine, Carlos Gesmundo in Minnesota, and Hongjing Shen who is visiting in Buffalo, New York, send weather reports about snow piling higher and higher.

Never used
snow rising on top of
the bluebird house

Icy sidewalk
snowflakes cling
to my coat

Cold moonlight
spills on the suitcase
home away from home

Cold air is sweeping across Bulgaria writes Nelly Dobrinova. The smell of baked bread warms her fellow poet Radostina Angelova.

Across the frozen lake
sky-high traces
of wind

Smell of bread
in the neighborhood--
lflour outside the bakery

A cup of tea warms Grzegorz Sionkowski in Torun, Poland. Katarzyna Predota's grandmother fears the frost growing at the edges of all the glass panes in her home.

Winter night--
in my cup of tea
warm moonlight

Hoarfrost
grandmother looks
in the mirror again

Shoichi Kuroda was enjoying a quiet evening when he suddenly felt as though his heart were pierced. It was so cold in Nagoya that Satoru Kanematsu's clock stopped.

Crossing alarm
red lamp on-and-off
winter moonlight

Not ticking
the digital clock--
freezing night

Michael Corr wore a transversely striped tie to celebrate the New Year of the Tiger. Several animals and plants with tiger-like coloring or fierce and vigorously aggressive traits share its name: tiger shark, tiger beetle, tiger moth, tiger swallowtail, tiger salamander, tiger grass and tiger lily.

Tie stripes match
glitz on unmatched socks
daffodils

Dusk match sticks
thrash bamboo swordsmen
tigers roar

Marshall Hryciuk spots a brown and orange butterfly in Toronto. Bill Cooper watches tigers play at a Virginia zoo.

Chill stillness
brown butterfly
in the orange-leaved light

After play fighting
the Sumatran tiger cub
licks her brother's elbow

On her way home after spending an enjoyable afternoon in a circus tent, Oana Posnaies looks skyward. Lenard D. Moore exits from a cinema feeling content. Perhaps it was a love story.

Just a single spot
above circus' cupola
the winter moon

Last fall night--
we leave the movie
hand-in-hand

Want to try composing haiku ?

Back numbers

The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears Feb 19. Readers are invited to send haiku for Valentine's Day on a postcard to David McMurray at the International University of Kagoshima, Sakanoue 8-34-1, Kagoshima, 891-0197, Japan, or e-mail to <mcmurray@fka.att.ne.jp>. One haiku is printed in the Asahi Haikuist column in the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun on the first, third and fifth Fridays of the month.