MITSUAKI KOJIMA

Summer breeze
listening to Chinese
everywhere

Chinese tourists and students can often be seen in shops and restaurants or riding the trains in Tokyo. Better paying jobs and more freedom to travel has encouraged many Chinese to form the newest wave of travelers to reach overseas shores. In exchange shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and teachers may try to learn the new foreign language. Fluent in French and English, and a veteran haiku painting, haiga, instructor Noriko Yoshida is likely contemplating writing haiku in Chinese on her next sketch.

G-8 men
meet on a hilltop
wrapped in mist

G-8 flags
waving in warm breeze
lavender

Hoteliers in Hokkaido have enjoyed hosting G-8 leaders and their entourage, though Kiyoshi Fukuzawa points out most people had to be content with watching the generally closed proceedings on TV. North Carolina haikuist Charlie Smith admires the lavender that blooms best on the northern island.

Holiday camp
her long nails strike
guitar strings

Bawdy songs
around the log fire
summer camp

Polish poet Katarzyna Predota enjoyed listening to a guitar while sitting round a fire. Gautam Nadkarni found similar pleasure in India.

Daimonji bon fire
having heard nothing from him
for a long time

Summer's end
the scent of charcoal
lingers

Unwitting
glacier bear tips ears
"Bye summer"

Sosuke Kanda laments not getting news from a friend in Japan. Summer is already over for Jamaican poet Raquel Bailey, but she recalls many a pleasurable evening. Michael Corr bids farewell to summer in Alaska.

Distant days
all rivers led to
Milky Way

Never lost
the Milky Way two-
destiny

Tanabata, the star festival, is celebrated for only one day a year, yet it is a tale that has been told since distant times writes Yutaka Kitajima. Murasaki Sagano marvels at the star-crossed lovers.

West wind
in the high trees
and the higher sky

God's work?
tints of hydrangea
creation

Who's Basho?
frogs have no idea
an old pond

Neal Woolery reports storm winds crashed through his hometown in Nebraska and uprooted hundreds of trees all over the city in just a matter of minutes. After the storm passed he composed his haiku while watching the wind streaming through an undamaged, tall stand of trees. While Shiro Ogawa writes about another form of god’s work, Kanematsu offers his best regards to Matsuo Basho.

Want to try composing haiku ?

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