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MITSUAKI KOJIMA |
Rain continues to influence what haikuists write about this summer. Murasaki Sagano is holed up with novels in Kyoto waiting for the rains to pass. Noriko Yoshida says she was up all night reading the surprising "The Da Vinci Code," but felt so good by morning that she made pancakes.
Life starts slow
in the rainy season
pile of books
Rainy season
flipping a pancake
perfectly
Sagami Matsuda marks the slow passing of the rainy season by the deepening hue of hydrangeas.
The rainy season blooms have a brilliance that surpasses even the skies at this time of year, remarks Satoru Kanematsu.
Passing time
hydrangeas
blue to violet
After rain
hydrangeas bluer
than the sky
Melie Monnerat composed her haiku while trekking in cedar forests on Yakushima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture. A geographer at the University of Laval in Canada, she traveled to the World Heritage Site with a botanist and forester from the International University of Kagoshima. The soaring limbs of the thousand-year-old trees carry shrubs and other trees such as the white blossoming mountain cap.
Fragile white
blossoms light the trails
old forest
The resin in the Yakushima cedar is so strong that stumps, unlike the oak Michael Corr writes about in Nagoya, never rot. Reiko Nishimura worries about her cousin who lives alone in the forests in Italy.
Industrious
shelf mushrooms eating
through dead oak
Thriving woods
alone in a manor
cousin in Florence
The firefly poem by Gill Foss originally appeared in "Invisible Tea," a fine collection of haiku published by Bondi Studios in Carleton Place, Ontario.
Guy Simser, who wrote the following poem in the book, was introduced to haiku when he was posted at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo 17 years ago. Sylvia Adams flavors the book with a tongue-in-cheek look at how she felt returning to Canada after enjoying an exotic trip.
mountain ash
all a twitter
first waxwings
home from
the orient
to mashed potatoes
Lana Holmes wrote the poem that gave the book its title. Terry Ann Carter, one of the co-editors, writes about students in an English as a Second Language classroom in Canada.
from his tiny teapot
sharing two cups
of invisible tea
ESL classroom
multicolored
snowflakes
Want to try composing haiku ?
Back numbers
The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears July 1. Readers are welcome to mail haiku for the season, contest announcements and haiku anthologies for review to David McMurray at the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011. A color version of the Asahi Haikuist Network can be seen at <www.asahi.com/english/haiku>.
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ASAHI WEEKLY