MITSUAKI KOJIMA

Stirred from a vivid dream about his father, David Quinter decided to put pen to paper. His father appeared young and fit, and his father wanted to play basketball in the visions that included old childhood friends and revelations about his dad David hadn't realized before.

Only when the dream was over did Quinter remember that his father had passed away 30 years before.

Writing from Chiba, Reiko Nishimura expresses her grief by comparing a long life to a tight-fitting coffin, while Asuka Kan said prayers at an Osaka graveyard.

96 years
closed in his coffin
so compact

Ancestral grave
hands placed together
autumn equinox

In this poem penned near his Nagoya home, Michael Corr mentions the red amaryllis. With its cluster of spidery red fronds, it shoots up from the ground without taking time to show foliage. Reiko Nishimura contrasts its unmistakable deep red hue against the backdrop of a cloudless autumn sky.

Green hills of
Okehazama
red grave weeds

Cluster-amaryllis,
year by year the sky
deepens blue

Serbian poet Jasminka Nadaskic Diordievic makes effective use of hyperbole by indulging the reader in an everyday event-a quiet rest by the window-with exaggerated grandness.

Never before
so much tea: frosty autumn
by the window

Keiko Fukunaga also writes about her father, euphemizing his illness by mentioning his garden in Kagoshima. Marites Omori worries about her mother on a farm in Yamanashi.

Father's ill
weed grown garden waits
for his hands

Alone sick
mother on the phone_
autumn winds

Marita Schrader laments the buzzing of flies in her home in Germany. Unable to swat them during their peak breeding season at the end summer, she vows to get them in autumn.

Soon autumn_
the fly can be caught
simply

In Hiroshima, Doc Sunday shares his view as a father happily escorting his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Tomohiko Uchino finds solace in reassuring news on the phone from his recently employed son.

Chapel rose
the bride and father
edding step

Long distance
my son has a job
harvest moon


-END-

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The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears Oct. 29-30. Readers are invited to send haiku about autumn festivals such as Halloween, contest announcements and recently published haiku anthologies for review to David McMurray at the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011.