MITSUAKI KOJIMA

Station passed
no visitors there
quiet fall

Rural Japan has fallen silent. Harvest festivals and red maple leaves used to draw city folk, but Masami Fujita passes by several empty train stations en route to his hometown. Penned in a pithy 3-5-3 syllable form, his haiku moment occurs after the train departs. He realizes that the station looked abandoned compared to the days of his youth when it bustled with activity each autumn. To economize, there is no longer a regular station master and the soba noodle shop that used to be on the platform has closed. No one gets on or off the train.

Cow's alp descent--
the chime of bells softens
from year to year

Autumn again
leaves on the alley rustle
more slowly

Late autumn light
bales of hay in the fields
moved the artist brush

Valeria Barouch believes her alpine home in Switzerland is getting quieter. Magdalena Banaszkiewicz comments on the slowing pace of her village in Poland. Jane Scott observes how a painter almost becomes part of the landscape.

Moon first
post surgery she points at
harvest sphere

Hospice monologue ...
after a few words the
silence of fall

Hospice pond
butterfly on wheelchair
heart flutters

A convalescing friend of Michael Corr had neither ring, nor watch when she silently pointed to the most cherished gift she could see in the heavens. Wolfgang Beutke guides his reader into a room of full of loneliness and sorrow. An ailing patient mumbles a few words. No one hears them, except perhaps the autumn wind. Perhaps the reader doesn't need to be told it is a monologue. Charlie Smith visited a small hospital where small gifts of nature cheered the residents.

Cloudless sky
swallows dissolving
the dream spreads

Blue sky--clear
as the day dad died
a shrike shrieks

Raytea dreams about the endless clear blue autumn skies over his home in Kanagawa. For a time, Satoru Kanematsu could only look up into the face of the deep blue skies over his home in Nagoya many years ago.

You leaving
crunched cherry leaves
autumn chill

The feel of the autumn chill and the sound of the brittle leaves imply sadness in this haiku by Qing Lu. There is little need to add the verb to weep or to croon on the second line to explain this haiku to the reader.

Old professor
intent on reading
campus ginkgo

Leaves hidden in books--
academic term begins
with a cigarette

Dark shelter ...
the old birdwatcher zooms on
autumn glory

Shiro Ogawa in Tokyo, Matthew Dawiec in Poland, and Wolfgang Beutke in Germany write about the lifestyles of older academics at the start of the fall semester.

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