MITSUAKI KOJIMA

Autumn, not spring is the poet's season of loneliness. Yet, Koju Fujieda's haiku hints at the desolation of Echizen in Fukui Prefecture. His two haiku highlight the distinction between the poet's emotion of sadness and the feeling of happiness that haikuists usually associate with the seasonal references.

In whose memory?
magnolia in full bloom
deserted farmhouse

Not a soul
in local sports park
sparrows' joy

The reader must listen to what the next two poems have to tell with as open a mind as possible. Deep in self-reflection, while listening to a moonlight sonata alone in Aomori, Tatsuko Toshima drifted off to sleep before discovering an answer. The words she uses to express her feelings contradict conventional images of flowers and melody. Spring at midnight connotes loneliness, whereas the reader might usually feel joy in waking to a spring morning at dawn.

What is emptiness?
neither flower nor sound
midnight spring

Tempting sleep
mystic melody
hazy moon

Tanya Dikova recalls a scene from her childhood in Tel Aviv. Yoko Arakawa pines for her mother in Osaka. Gautam Nadkarni spent a quiet moment alone in Mumbai.

Alone at home
on high heels--little feet
mum's dress--still long

Meeting mother
at the spring festival--
in a dream

Summer dawn--
the sun rises in
a glass of water

Joyce Arsnow refers to April in Maryland as "the seasonless spring" because it has been unseasonably cold. She was so surprised to see what the lone tulip in her yard was up to that she rhymed her poem. Kyoko Kamata surmises that nobody witnessed the unfolding of the tulip in her garden.

Visited by the bee
the tulip has lost
her virginity

No one there
red tulip opens
afternoon

The 30th annual Haiku Canada conference opened May 18 at Carleton University in Ottawa. During the weekend event George Swede compared haiku with tanka, and Dina Cox compared senryu with haiku.

Canadian poet Michael Dudley and musician Dustin Stendel merged haiku with jazz. Handmade books published by Turtle Light Press were displayed. The following poems by Peter Brady and Philomene Kocher appeared in the Haiku Canada members' anthology "Rain Song" last May.

Leaving home for good
slowly carefully down
the icy steps

In the cathedral
a cell phone
answered on the first ring

Angelika Kolompar sent the following haiku from Vancouver Island.

The rainbow
found in the child's kimono
black eyes glowing

Want to try composing haiku ?

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The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear June 2, 16, and 30. Readers are invited to send haiku for the summer 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 <is@asahi.com>.