MITSUAKI KOJIMA

Some haikuists pass the New Year at home. Others prefer to travel, seeking warm hot springs or island resorts. Kobayashi Issa wrote this poem on returning home to Kashiwabara in 1812 after 36 years of travel: Hochi hochi to yuki ni kurumaru zaisho kana.

Snowflakes wrap
around my hometown
softly white

Yumi Zaitsu, a university student in Kagoshima, composed a haiku about her hometown using soothing French syntax: Des fleurs blanches colorant une ville desolee d'hiver.

White flowers
color the village
in winter

Home for Anna Akamatsu is a long-term care facility in Kawasaki. Yumi Hirate lit a fire in the hearth of a cabin in the mountains near Osaka, then settled in to watch sleet change to snow.

My boyfriend
wounded old lion
winter "home"

Mountain cabin
nestles
among snows

Islands are a recurrent theme in contemporary haiku. Canadian haikuist Angelika Kolompar published these reveries in "Vancouver Island Poetry" printed by Loonbook in 2006.

In the misty sea
Islands float unseen--
Daydreams

A deep sigh
As the ocean tide
Ebbs and flows

"An Island Year," edited by LeRoy Gorman and printed by the Haiku Canada association, features 10 poems by Winona Baker including "heavy rain." Marinko Kovacevic dedicates a chapter of his humorous anthology "Committed to the Road" published by the Association of Croatian Haiku Poets in Zagreb to "A little island."

heavy rain
the farmer missing
from the toy farm

Inhabited island:
an old woman and her goat.
Well, and a cricket!

Indian haikuist R.K. Singh poetically shapes human forms into islands in "The River Returns" published by Prakash Book Depot in 2006.

At the river
she folds her arms and legs
resting her head
upon the knees and sits
as an island

A star in making--
but an island appears:
the palm amuses

Lyn Reeves published "Walking the Tideline" from her home on Tasmania Island in Australia. In "Shorelines" printed by Small Poetry Press, Tony Mariano and Bruce England co-wrote "Islands of light drift" in Carmel, California. "Pop Haiku" printed by 12 Translation K. & C. penned by Kenji Matsuda on Yakushima island includes a rhetorical question about fruit.

along the beach
roses someone scattered
out at sea

Islands of light drift
paced by great wreaths of mist
across a dark bay

Ponkan blossoms
When did they begin to blossom
on this island?

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The Asahi Haikuist Network next appears on Jan. 27. Send haiku to David McMurray at the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011, by fax to 03-5541-8539, or by e-mail to .