May 4, 2012

Deserted cottage
Pine needles in the pan
for lunch
--Zoran Doderovic (Serbia)

Taking a break while mountain hiking, the haikuist thinks about what he might eat. The noise of Hidehito Yasui’s pleasure craft scares fish in the Seto Inland Sea. Out for a walk in Waterloo, Ontario, Barry Weiler is lured by the beauty of the moon. His cabin in Niigata having been closed all winter long, Yutaka Kitajima opens its windows with a flourish.

Poor catch
too many cooking utensils
pleasure-boat cabin

Moonlight
drops its yellow nets:
the want of fish to be caught

Spring sunlight
flooding the cottage
clapboards removed

Ramesh Anand savors a hot meal in rural India. Even at night, Vo Tuan Hoang Vy cannot escape the heat and humidity of his home in Vietnam.

From a distance
the smell of boiling rice
thatched hut

Hot night
even moonlight
cottage burning

Valeria Barouch spends the night in a Swiss cabin. An unexpected visitor greets Vania Stefanova in Bulgaria. Michael Corr didn’t look back. Fusayo Kawano ponders the riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Through black ink branches
the narrow trail disappears
the cabin smoke

This small turtle
upon debris from the hut
still morning

Trust again
leaving beach cabin
unlocked

Hut in a field
door slamming in wind
but who cares?

Romano Zeraschi reads alone in Italy. Ecaterina Neagoe sits with a friend in Romania.

Spring wind
browsing a forgotten book . . .
alone on a bench

Only two of us--
the wind undulating
cherry blossoms

Rahadian Tanjung draws a line in the sand at an Indonesian beach. Zeraschi piles his words one atop the other. Pravat Kumar Padhy floats cherry petals down a stream in India. Shizuka Suzuki veers around a curve in Tokyo. In Kyoto, Murasaki Sagano is drawn toward her mother.

Drawing a line
on the sandy shore
burning sun

My
hut . . .
a
candle in the dark
cricket
song

Spring rain--
cherry blossoms on
meandering flow

On the curve
kerrias bloom
here and there

Gravitate
towards mother’s soul
May birthday

Teichi Suzuki finds a pressed blossom between the leaves of a book. Yuji Hayashi would love to lie down in a bed of pink cherry petals. Stella Pierides chides a poet for concentrating on form more than feeling. His colleague deprecates herself but praises Satoru Kanematsu.

Cherry petals
folded in the story of
an old book

A poet’s dream:
to lie under cherry trees
in full bloom

Instead of
cherry-blossom-viewing
she counts syllables

Black pansies
the old haikuist calls
herself witch

Want to try composing haiku ?

Back numbers

The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears May 18. Readers are invited to send haiku about camping on a postcard to David McMurray at the International University of Kagoshima, Sakanoue 8-34-1, Kagoshima, 891-0197, Japan, or by e-mail to (mcmurray@fka.att.ne.jp).