lunar eclipse the long shadow of the pandemic
--Beate Conrad (Hildesheim, Germany)

* * *

first stars…
the toddler moves
around his cereal
--Alan Summers (Wiltshire, England)

* * *

sleeping in--
the infant cries
a little louder
--Alex Fyffe (Houston, Texas)

* * *

falling... falling petals,
asking the fireflies
where God is
--Lilia Racheva (Rousse, Bulgaria)

* * *

Jet trails
scarring the blue sky
--still on ICU
--Lothar M. Kirsch (Kall, Germany)

* * *

lockdown
a rainbow finds its way
--the long conversations with my daughter
--Ken Sawitri (Blora, Indonesia)

* * *

Jasmine scent--
gleaming in the dark
a cat’s eyes
--Satoru Kanematsu (Nagoya)

* * *

Eyes stare
at me--
(for)getting my mask
--T.D. Ginting (Murakami, Chiba)

* * *

after the hailstorm
polka dots plaster windows
snake eyes--craps you lose
--J.L. Huffman (Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina)

* * *

15 wild elephants
walk all the way to Kunming
to attend COP 15
--Chen Xiaoou (Kunming, China)

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

Young men pier fishing...
do they care about COVID
keeping the distance
--Kiyoshi Fukuzawa (Tokyo)

The haikuist noted how fishers carefully lined up along a wharf so as not to interfere with each other’s catch. Robin Rich viewed a line of commuters waiting for a train in Brighton, England. Hidehito Yasui admired azaleas and alpine plants on Nambu Kyuryo hill in the idyllic town of Sakai--where local railway operators are struggling financially to keep it running for tourists.

people line the platform
carriages on the line

* * *

Laughing mountains…
unmanned station at the trail
hikers with rucksacks

Awake at midnight in Sicily, Vincenzo Adamo placed three dots after a noun phrase on the first line.

recycle fears...
I listen to the night
howling wolves

A student of haiku in Sapporo, Natsu Takada punctuated her haiku and timed it for Mountain Day and the scheduled closing ceremony of the Olympics on Aug. 8. Ken Sawitri marked Ramadan in Blora, Indonesia.

smell of fresh paint...
mountains play
thousands of colors

* * *

scorching heat...
the fasting boy’s pocket
full of marbles

Kana Shiozaki, a creative writing student at Hokusei Gakuen University, penned this haiku about springtide with an ellipsis that makes readers pause before the third line.

digging in the sand
finding new life...
confidence

Making her debut to this column from New Braunfels, Texas, during a COVID-19 lockdown, Kathleen Vasek Trocmet might have felt her life was experiencing a total lunar eclipse.

anger management
beating the pillow...
blood moon

Angela Giordano paused with a caesura of excitement: oh, the fireflies... the stars have come down into the garden. In Itta Bena, Mississippi, John Zheng very efficiently cut his lawn and haiku.

yard-mowing
stop to see the glow
of a firefly

Marshall Hryciuk teases readers to hold their breath at the end of each line of this haiku. Shell-shocked, he nonetheless admired beauty breaking free from the restrictions one had put on.

snagged
in my wife’s bodice
a cicada case

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) typed long dashes--referring to them as vigorous space dashes to be breathed in by a jazz musician between the expelling of phrases--in these three jazz-like rhythmic “haikus”:

Birds singing in the dark--Rainy dawn.

Dawn--the tomcat hurrying home With his tail down.

The taste of rain--Why kneel?

A bird cooing from its roost startled Kanchan Chatterjee in Jamshedpur, India. Marek Kozubek dashed outside after a storm passed by Bangkok.

just before
the gale starts
a cuckoo!

* * *

after the gale--
from silence the sound
of cicada

Teiichi Suzuki’s non-punctuated haiku resembled nonstop clear-cut voices in Osaka. Mario Massimo Zontini’s dash cut the distinct staccato rhythm breaks he heard in Parma, Italy.

Buzzing cicadas
without paragraphs
nor short breaks

* * *

suddenly it starts
suddenly it stops--
the cicadas’ cry

Satoru Kanematsu’s first line shouted for an exclamation mark and his last line begged for a string of three dots. Wisely, he chose not to end on such an ellipsis. He retained his author’s intent, and confirmed that finishing in silence is how this haiku must be aesthetically interpreted. Roberta Beach Jacobson left readers down in the dark void of her haunted house in Indianola, Iowa.

Cries just once
midnight cicada
then silence

* * *

creepy
basement visitor
I count legs

Kathleen Vasek Trocmet critiqued a symphony in New Braunfels, Texas. Stoianka Boianova was disappointed by the musicians in Sofia, Bulgaria.

crickets and cicadas
an intense crescendo...
campfire sputters

* * *

cicadas scrape
and muffle the violin
concert by river

Vandana Parashar’s second line began with ellipsis punctuation and ended with an unmarked rhetorical question about the hereafter. Francoise Maurice directly added punctuation marks to her haiku penned in Draguignan, France.

cicada’s husk
...is that all
we leave behind

* * *

end of the party
does the cicada die
after its song?

Taofeek Ayeyemi paused before asking a question in Lagos, Nigeria.

lightning...
is that a cop’s siren
or ambulance?

Zdenka Mlinar noted that the muster of long-legged white storks that returned to Zagreb might have nowhere to roost this summer. A skewer of long-necked white egrets resembles question marks.

demolished chimneys...
where are the storks?

Exoskeletons fertilize Giuliana Ravaglia’s garden in Bologna, Italy.

cicada...
empty shell of my womb

Tail between its legs, P.H. Fischer’s best friend reluctantly went for a walk in Vancouver. There’s a long pause at the end of John Hawkhead’s lines about an ex. Found everywhere in Tokyo these days, Kiyoshi Fukuzawa thinks the “please do not sit here” stickers are rather standoffish.

dog looks embarrassed
clickety clackety
cowboy boots

* * *

old girlfriend
when she walks past
I hold my breath

* * *

X-marks
float over empty seats
library chill

Teiichi Suzuki employed six dots on his second line that represent the Japanese language style of writing an ellipsis.

Counting deaths
. . . . . .
covid blues

R.W. Watkins in Newfoundland, and Kanematsu in Nagoya, respectively, used a colon to punctuate these haiku.

sage-level vision:
children spotting animals
in cirriform clouds

* * *

Buddha’s frown:
COVID’s rampant spread
India

Ashoka Weerakkody felt a gradual change in the spring-like weather of Colombo, Sri Lanka, “as a strong breeze suddenly comes … shaking and bending the lush flowering temple trees and coconut palms in the village … sprinkling the footpaths … where the Buddha was born some 2,600 years ago.”

month of Vesak
the breeze carries me away...
Enlightened one

Dennys Cambarau abruptly pivoted back home to Sardinia, Italy.

ship lights--
the waves bring me back
pieces of moon

Although they are considered critically endangered by the United Nations, Lysa Collins hopes more people will give pause--and think of better ways to protect--the remaining two-horned black rhinoceros from reckless poachers in Africa.

low veldt--
old rhinos shuffle
into the heedless night

Pippa Phillips used an em dash to mark a break on the second line of this haiku to join two pieces of information as well as explain how gold joinery was used to repair a Dutch tin-blue glazed white plate.

May
lightning--kintsugi
on delftware

Andrew Punk dedicated this poem to his parents.

lunar eclipse
the old couple
shares a blanket

Having arranged this haiku without punctuation in Marmora, Ontario, John Hamley toyed with the reader, perhaps into thinking that the break comes after the second line, whereas you might find that by the third line that, no, it came after the first.

Minnows in my creek
so slowly
moves the sun

Robin Rich followed prose and a period with poetry: after the . poetic meter

Alex Fyffe dashed away--as there was nothing further to add.

a greeting card
with nothing written inside--

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

The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear July 16 and 30. Readers are invited to send haiku about waiting or leaving 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).

* * *

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).