Mitsuaki Kojima

Composing poetry keeps haikuists up night and day. In Switzerland this summer, Akito Mori watched the morning sun color in the northern horizon. At noon in Nagoya, Barbara Casterline caught a swirling sight with her camera. Later, watching Olympic swimming, she penned a similar scene in 3-5-3 syllable form.

　Golden carp
　quite naturally
　synchronize

The next haiku was penned at tea time in Glasgow, where Doc Sunday was attending a conference.

　Church ruin
　watercolour sky
　red flower

David Quinter says he felt a sense of deja vu when viewing a pattern of pink clouds against a blue evening sky-he realized it matched the colors of the bicycle he had just given his daughter. Around midnight in Nagoya, Satoru Kanematsu penned a surrealistic haiku about being in an elevator with a buzzing insect. At the same time in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture, Reiko Nishimura wrote about how it feels to be alive. She may have been watching a news report showing the path of a typhoon pummeling Minamata in Kumamoto.

　Going up
　with a mosquito
　midnight lift

　Midnight gale
　distant typhoon shows
　my existence

After a typhoon missed Tokyo, Sagami Matsuda relaxed into a late night bath. Michael Corr notes that not only humans feel relief when bad weather passes.

　Relaxing
　tub filled to the brim
　typhoon passes<

　Temple shrine
　roosters celebrate
　post-typhoon

Tokyo-based haikuist Noriko Yoshida's next poem ends with the expression ``here and there,'' which is often used to sketch glimpses of red in maple trees, the jumping of fish or sporadic chirping of crickets.
The common phrase takes on a tragic note, however, when describing this month's typhoons in Asia, hurricanes in America, bombs in Indonesia and terrorist attacks in Russia.

　September
　tragedy happens
　here and there

Writing from Saipan, Joseph Connolly composed the following 9/11 memorial haiku:

　Our world is in pain
　a sad country recovers
　a new time has come

Want to try composing haiku ?

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Send haiku for the autumnal equinox and harvest season to David McMurray at the Asahi Haikuist Network, International Herald Tribune / Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011 or by fax to 03-5541-8539.