Mitsuaki Kojima

　Patrick Sweeney's playful point of view leads off this week's column of haiku that contrast vivid colors with various tastes and fragrances. Gerd Boerner refers to the new moon. His crafting of a montage of purple-scented darkness was an exquisite idea.
　Better than any laundry soap commercial could ever explain,Zenzo Toda tells us how white his shirts really are by holding them up against a backdrop of billowing cumulus clouds. His haiku placed third in the Minami Nihon Shimbun contest. Noticing how white things look in the blue skies of spring, Doc Sunday in Hiroshima submitted the following metaphor about a jet stream.

White dragons
flying in the sky:
vapor trails

　Alisa Shoda turns our attention to the colors of love. She is studying Haiku in English at Tezukayama Gakuin University in Osaka. The next poem on a similar theme is by Georgiana Branciforte of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, who wrote it for a younger classmate at her nursing college. It is followed by her attempt to explain why she finds the cardiovascular system so beautiful, believing ``the way it flows through the body it is analogous to poetry.''

Spring dream
the yet untasted
first kiss

Woven path
of life-blood, God's
Celtic knot

　In the next poem by Joyce Arsnow of Adelphi, Maryland, the red coloring of the bird stands out vividly on the first line. Originally the word love was meant to be an adjective modifying the bird's song.
　By wrapping the noun around onto the second line it creates more of a poetic flow; in a similar fashion to what Michael Corr achieves with his penning of Shakespeare's sunshine below it.

Cardinal's love
song rough on my ears
true pitch stretched

Shakespeare's sun
shine transmutation
remains light

　Mayumi Mori of Tezukayama, Osaka and Charlie Smith in Raleigh,North Carolina, submitted the next poems that bring the pink dogwood into focus.

Dogwood flower
I see it and
its beauty

After rain
pink dogwood petals
rain again

Want to try composing haiku ?

Back numbers

Readers are invited to send haiku for the season to David McMurray at the Asahi Haikuist Network, International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011.