MITSUAKI KOJIMA

Travelers necessarily keep tuned to weather reports, which may be one reason why people compose so many haiku while abroad. Nobuko Masakawa was taken for a ride in Paris. Murasaki Sagano's thoughts seem to have been carried away as far as France in this poem penned in Kyoto. Canadian haikuist Marshall Hryciuk caught sight of an awkward looking bird rising from a weedy pond.

Summer nap
"la fin" to the dream
sudden shower
Marsh a great blue heron
lifts itself
to a dead branch

Hann Ling Wong makes his debut in the Asahi Haikuist Network with a poem about a dangerous hurricane named Emily that caused his business trip to be cancelled. Anna Akamatsu was happy to see typhoon No. 5 leave her home in Kawasaki. Charlie Smith enjoys a peaceful sunset in North Carolina.

Typhoon gone
shining white clouds float
merrily

Glowing sky
rice field reflections
stars and stripes

Iolanda Moya Serra traveled to Canterbury to study how to paint and write haiku. She originally submitted a 5-7-5 syllable haiku, but it was shortened to the one below based on the similarly pithy poem penned by her teacher Noriko Yoshida.

Silent night
wind on dark water
lotus dance

Mayhem:
sweeping summer rain
in London

Michael Corr was in Kasadera when he wrote the next haiku about the taste of a southern island treat. Its bitter aftertaste made him vary from his usual 3-5-3 syllable format and pose the rhetorical question. In Branxton, Australia, Lorne Henry refers to her haiku as a Down Under weather poem. She says she is experiencing: "Very different weather from the haiku in this week's Asahi Haikuist Network page."

Okinawa
bitter melon chips
you say? Temple Fair

Tiny finch
hovers by the drip
winter rain

Despite terrorist bombings in London, Paul Conneally reports that his countrymen "carry on."

His poem juxtaposes this summer's biggest headline news with everyday life: the equipment used in the game of cricket, a seasonal word for British haiku. Jorg Rakowski sends this haiku from Germany.

Terror-
exercising fatalism
London Tube

Mickey Nasu wrote a poem in honor of astronaut Soichi Noguchi who traveled the furthest away from Japan this summer. Barbara Casterline composed her haiku based on a color photo image of the mysterious Martian lake.

351 km
space rendezvous
the blue earth

Oyster shells
azure pearl cratered
in north Mars

Want to try composing haiku ?

Back numbers

The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears Sept. 17. Readers are invited to mail haiku to David McMurray at the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011.