a swathe of pink blossoms champagne in the park
--Marion Clarke (Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland)

* * *

Peach blossoms
an isolated house
in limelight
--Murasaki Sagano (Tokyo)

* * *

COVID plague--
turns cruise ship into
floating jail
--Satoru Kanematsu (Nagoya)

* * *

luxury liner
all the passengers in fear
viral infection
--Doc Sunday (Hiroshima)

* * *

Inside my closed hand--
a petal from the dogwood
a captive prayer
--Priscilla Lignori (Montgomery, New York)

* * *

my cat screams
its need to go out--
prison for two
--Margherita Petriccione (Scauri, Italy)

* * *

Thundering
Streaks of lightning
Clawing the skies
--Anne-Marie McHarg (London)

* * *

frost between us--
the cats in heat
they make love
--Vincenzo Adamo (Italy)

* * *

blind date for a cat
an alleyway becomes
a tunnel of love
--Alan Summers (Wiltshire, England)

* * *

junkyard rain
a stray cat shelters
in a microwave oven
--Jay Friedenberg (Riverdale, New York)

------------------------------
FROM THE NOTEBOOK
------------------------------

Here we are--
on a bookshelf too
mini dolls
--Yutaka Kitajima (Joetsu, Niigata)

The Hina Matsuri (Doll festival) celebrated on March 3 never ceases to amaze the haikuist. Dolls of all shapes and sizes fit every nook and cranny where he lives. Tiffany Shaw-Diaz shopped for a new doll friend in Centerville, Ohio. Ezio Infantino celebrated the peach blossom festival in Verona, Italy. Kiyoshi Fukuzawa winked at the first sip of his homemade mix of unripe green plums and rock sugar steeped in shochu.

a remedy
for lack of friends--
American Girl catalogue

* * *

Glass harmonica ...
rainbow drops
on the blooming peach trees

* * *

Plums blooming
in the corner of my heart
fragrant ume liquor

While Anne-Marie McHarg was walking to her local supermarket in London she “caught a glimpse of a Japanese lady in full kimono dress” and “it was so unusual I looked twice,” she said. Rodica Stefan admired a fashionable gentleman in Bucharest, Romania. On a visit to Kunming, China, Roger Watson was surprised to hear people calling out and pointing toward sakura blossoms. Writing from Pasadena, California, Kath Abela Wilson remarked, “Thinking of blossoms I am overwhelmed with memories of our visits to Japan ... and from my East Coast childhood.”

Kimono
Swaying plum blossoms
Scented path

* * *

red camellia
in his boutonniere--
dreamy glances

* * *

Kunming city
even here
sakura blossoms

* * *

Fallen pink flowers
on the table …
we spread our picnic

Luciana Moretto couldn’t resist cutting a branch of fragrant yellow wintersweet in Treviso, Italy. Kitajima understands magnolia petals are untouchable.

stolen branch
of Japanese allspice
pale purple even

* * *

Biting wind
magnolias in bud
all upright

Christof Blumentrath slowly picked petals off an ox-eye daisy while alternately reciting “she loves me, she loves me not.” Sheila Riley admits that she’s “not a cat lover” and is “even a bit afraid of them,” yet she feels she can understand them. Josephine LoRe can’t.

one more daisy
i double-check
if she loves me

* * *

it does not love me
pressing against my ankles
purring with purpose

* * *

oh kitty
if you love me so
why must you bite

Writing from Camden, Maine, Kristen Lindquist hopes “someday to see the cherry blossoms in Japan,” adding that “there’s nothing like a flowering apple tree full of waxwings ...” Angela Giordano couldn’t protect her prized Italian Plum.

apple blossoms
ravaged by waxwings
but gently

* * *

rebellious wind--
the flowers of the plum tree
all torn

Taofeek Ayeyemi toyed with a playful pet in Lagos, Nigeria. Tomislav Maretic’s tom strayed toward Sljeme ski resort in Zagreb, Croatia.

split star apple--
again and again the cat pokes
the toy car

* * *

untouched food--
my tomcat’s traces
in February snow

Lauris Burns traveled between Lima, Peru, and Wilmington, North Carolina.

Strange flowers bloom here
Where the snow of winter is
Daffodils abound

Ken Sawitri noted that the largest flower ever to be found grows to the east of Lake Maninjau in Sumatra. The talented Indonesian haikuist who now lives in Central Java said she “is writing haiku to celebrate her homecoming.”

undisturbed forest
with rafflesia the guardian
... the crowd!

Kanematsu heard hoots and hollers. Eva Limbach’s bedroom window had been left slightly ajar. Mary Vlooswyk moved to a new home in the suburbs of Calgary, which borders a large natural park in Alberta.

Falling snow
ecstatic monkeys
in hot spring

* * *

making love
wild and unbridled--
spring cats

* * *

new neighbors
peering over the back fence
bobcats

Haiku is sometimes referred to as one-breath poetry, which is all the time McHarg needed to experience this moment.

In one breath
Flocks of wings
Take to the air

Tsanka Shishkova composes haiku in her daily journal. Rosemarie Schuldes jotted thoughts down quickly in Mattsee, Austria. Paul Faust discovered a restaurant worth writing about in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. Daniella Misso visited overnight with family in Savona, Italy, gleefully noting in her diary, “I sleep in my aunt’s room with plum blossoms wallpaper.”

diary book
with a map of Japan--
Christmas gift

* * *

fading contrails
in a wintry sky--
scrawly diary entry

* * *

an encounter with
newfound tastes and old-fashioned sites
seaside neighborhood

* * *

moonlight dusk--
fragrance of plum blossoms
in the notebook

Alegria Imperial weathered through wet Vancouver to compose this one-liner: into night a shedding sky. Peering out from a white room in his Toronto home, Marshall Hryciuk saw even more white: bathroom’s west window chill snow squall. McHarg reported severe flooding in London.

Torrential rain
Hitting against the windowpane
Never ceasing

While locks on the Upper Mississippi river lean-in to control snowmelt, John Zheng watched the full moon pull at the Yazoo river. Andy McLellan pulled at his heartstrings in Canterbury, U.K.　Maike Walbeck went beachcombing on the Spree river, which flows through Germany toward the North Sea. Jorge Alberto Giallorenzi went for an early morning stroll down the Rio de la Plata Basin in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

river flood
moonlight overflows
the levee

* * *

tracing the stitches
on my doctor’s lab coat
cardiac echo

* * *

tide change
waves wash ashore stars
and driftwood

* * *

river ravine
the song of a rooster
scented with flowers

John Hamley recalled picking golden fruit from swamps in Finnish Lapland. Murasaki Sagano spots snow down dark alleys, under bridges and behind park benches in Tokyo. Rose Mary Boehm uncovered a smile in Lima. Goran Gatalica connected with family in Croatia.

Cloudberries
here and there
slow walking

* * *

Remaining snow
in every shadow
afternoon walk

* * *

gentle eyes--
a smile behind branches
of the berry bush

* * *

family reunion
the overlapping branches
of plum blossoms

Aloof cats left broken-hearted Kanematsu and Vandana Parashar, respectively, to mend by themselves.

Left alone
by my cat in love
crescent moon

* * *

thawing snow
my cat leaves me
and my knitting alone

Walking alone in Romania, Steliana Voicu met a beautiful companion. Shishkova eyed a threesome settling in to await the full moon of March 9.

countryside journey …
at the end of every lane
the moon in bloom

* * *

worm moon
on the roof pretty cat
and two tomcats

--------------------------------------------------

It’s always a peach of a day at http://www.asahi.com/ajw/special/haiku/. The next regular issue appears on the vernal equinox, March 20, and an Asahi Haikuist Special column appears March 27 to share the results of the Matsuyama Photo Haiku Contest supported by The Asahi Shimbun. Readers are invited to send haiku about baseball on a postcard to David McMurray at the International University of Kagoshima, Sakanoue 8-34-1, Kagoshima, 891-0197, Japan, or e-mail to mcmurray@fka.att.ne.jp.

* * *

David McMurray has been writing the Asahi Haikuist Network column since April 1995, first for the Asahi Evening News. He is on the editorial board of the Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, columnist for the Haiku International Association, and is editor of Teaching Assistance, a column featuring graduate students in The Language Teacher of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT).

McMurray is professor of intercultural studies at The International University of Kagoshima where he lectures on international haiku. At the Graduate School he supervises students who research haiku. He is a correspondent school teacher of Haiku in English for the Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo.

McMurray judges haiku contests organized by Ito En Oi Ocha, Asahi Culture Center, Matsuyama City, Polish Haiku Association, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Seinan Jo Gakuin University, and Only One Tree.

McMurray's award-winning books include: "Only One Tree Haiku, Music & Metaphor" (2015); "Canada Project Collected Essays & Poems" Vols. 1 -- 8 (2013); and "Haiku in English as a Japanese Language" (2003).