planting an olive tree for my children late summer blues
--Eva Limbach (Saarbrucken, Germany)

* * *

one fierce wave
upon another...
blue dragon drifts
--Richard Thomas (Plymouth, U.K.)

* * *

aging b52s
their tin roofs
rusted
--Curt Linderman (Seattle, Washington)

* * *

beyond the papaya trees
beyond the rusty roofs--
the sea changes colour
--Sandra Simpson (Tauranga, New Zealand)

* * *

last night’s argument--
the broken branches
left by the storm
--Pippa Phillips (St. Louis, Missouri)

* * *

a jumble of drift
upon the shore
crabs and gulls
--Albert Schepers (Windsor, Ontario)

* * *

boats moored
--a gull slaps itself
on the mast
--Noel King (Tralee, Ireland)

* * *

oil spill
a dolphin inhales
the dark dawn
--Rene Bohnen (Pretoria, South Africa)

* * *

peeling flakes of mica
and lowering my nose to rainy clover...
I say, I’m keeping busy
--Patrick Sweeney (Misawa, Aomori Prefecture)

* * *

afternoon prayers--
the black dog swims through a sea
of tall, golden wheat
--J.D. Nelson (Lafayette, Colorado)

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

Intramuros
the feel of a cobbled street
on a humid day
--Archie Carlos (Manila, Philippines)

The haikuist penned this tribute to a historic walled city that faces the South China Sea. The Philippines is regularly breached by typhoons from June to September. The warming of the Pacific has strengthened the power of tropical storms and lengthened the typhoon season to December. Sandra Simpson’s fellow parishioners spent days praying for the safe return of sailors.

whalers’ church--
all the hassocks
hand embroidered

Hifsa Ashraf reported that widespread areas in Pakistan were devastated by deadly monsoon floods. Nearly 300,000 homes were destroyed, so she is busy working with local fundraising organizations to help those in dire need.

rare family dinner
the chili flakes sizzle
in the sunflower oil

Sheila Barksdale took us safely in hand to join her childhood summer in Cornwall, England, “where the small coves and hidden rocks make for rough waves when the Atlantic tide rolls in. The meat pies in this haiku are Cornish pasties.”

Cling-wrapped meat pies:
what we set aside
for thrill of rough waves

Mel Goldberg watched daring thieves fly in low to snatch food from unsuspecting picnickers in San Nicholas de Ibarra, Mexico.

picnic on the beach
the aggressiveness
of seagulls

Melanie Vance said the roadside fields in Dallas, Texas, can be as pretty as the Gulf of Mexico.

color of the sea
from one horizon to the other
bluebonnets

Aleksandra Wajs’s brother in Warsaw, Poland, surprised the whole family by announcing he’d become a sailor.

morning ocean
onto his first adventures
young sailor steps aboard

Masumi Orihara felt revitalized when she heard Kenichi Horii had successfully traversed the ocean in a sailboat. Wajs was inspired by the old sailor.

tanned white-haired sailor’s
smile across the Pacific
non-stop solo sail

* * *

calloused hands
holding up
worn out ocean maps

Francis Attard dined al fresco in Marsa, Malta. Angela Giordano watched a bird nosedive into water without making a splash in Avigliano, Italy. Mike Fainzilber witnessed a perfect dive in Rehovot, Israel.

post coronavirus
tablecloth with prints of fish
for menu

* * *

the kingfisher
swoops down--
on a trout’s flicker

* * *

kingfisher in flight
one dive
is enough

Adjei Agyei-Baah awoke early to fish in Kumasi, Ghana, but didn’t catch anything all day.

dawn fishing
a lone canoe moves
without a boatman

* * *

fishless day
the fisherman’s shadow
part of a rock

Brian Kibet studies haiku in the “Kenya Saijiki” class in Nairobi, Kenya.

wet soil--
black ants dragging
a dead spider

Richard Thomas may have spotted a green sea turtle clamoring onto green algae floating at Plymouth Aquarium.

sea growth
an algae raft
for baby turtle

Bona M. Santos laments a harmful overgrowth off Los Angeles, California. Samo Kreutz was so upset that he couldn’t talk about the scum on the surface of the Adriatic Sea.

algal bloom
along the coast
empty fishing boats

* * *

ocean waves
the foam swallows
my voice

Eugeniusz Zacharski bowed an apology on a farm in Radom, Poland, located east of the Oder river where toxins were recently found in golden algae.

harvest day
the shadow of the scarecrow
grovelling

Giordano fathomed the color of sadness.

Ocean...
the eyes of the fisherman
lost within the blue

Mario Massimo Zontini sighted sails after a storm in the Ligurian Sea.

the ocean
sound of backwash--
in the offing, a ship

Slobodan Pupovac’s older brother was a sailor who died in a boating accident.

Indian Ocean
a big wave carried away
the sailor’s soul

Justice Joseph Prah got wind of an accident off Ghana.

cascading waves
reporting the far-away
death of sailors

Ram Chandran prayed for a divine soul that retained its bodily form on Earth.

monsoon rains--
the many avatar
of the arabian seas

Mircea Moldovan recalled when soldiers stormed the beaches of Europe. Today, naval activities on the Black Sea related to the Ukraine war have caused a rise in reported cetacean deaths.

whales on the beach
a veteran of war
changes the channel

Stoianka Boianova relaxed after a storm passed by Sofia, Bulgaria. From a beach in South Carolina, John S. Gilbertson watched the sunset in the Atlantic Ocean.

storm over
sea lions doze
by the ocean shore

* * *

Ocean drowns
light in a darkness
of quiet

Marcie Wessels might have been purring the nursery rhyme “red sky at night sailor’s delight, red sky in the morning sailor’s warning” before a storm roiled up her bed in San Diego, California.

before sunrise
the rough pink
tongue of the cat

Murasaki Sagano reticently bit her tongue in Tokyo.

Autumn dusk
a lull in the ocean
restrained wave

Schepers kept time with rhythmic waves.

between ebb and flow
the heron and gulls
sounds from ancient rocks

Kiyoshi Fukuzawa looked toward the Iwafune-oki Oil and Gas Field in the stormy Sea of Japan offshore from Arai-Hama, Niigata Prefecture.

Offshore oil wells
washed by storm waves
appear then disappear

A retired professor in Cordoba, Argentina, Julia Guzman awoke from an afternoon dream to a familiar high-pitched sound of “tea-cher, tea-cher, tea-cher.”

the call of oven birds
in the afternoon--
a distant storm

J.D. Nelson’s weather forecast came in threes: From the sight and sounds of ominous skies overhead Lafayette, Colorado.

three raptors circle
high above the neighborhood--
the storm approaches

* * *

the thunder rumbles--
the three chickens seek shelter
on the covered porch

* * *

a dove coos nearby--
the three hens in the bushes
scratch & peck for bugs

Liz Gibbs watched someone rummage through a container for recyclable materials in Calgary, Alberta. Discarded items thrown in the trash are in the public domain.

dumpster diver
closing the recycle bin
he knows all her secrets

Jerome Berglund’s attention was drawn in one direction, toward Minneapolis, Minnesota.

one way
the sign states
desperately

Ian Willey realized summer holidays are surreal in the sense that our subconscious plays its part in the construction of their meaning. Using the metaphor of a road trip by car, he explains: “Looking ahead, the summer holidays always seem like a vast stretch of time, but looking back...”

summer vacation--
clouds appear closer
than they are

Carl Brennan sensed the unchanging appearance of the sky over New York City. He was enraptured by the slow and melancholy progress of the clouds until they dissolved in a gray gently tinged with white.

Lilac scent
riding the southeast wind
Debussy’s “Nuages”

Murasaki Sagano’s garden experienced the tailwind of a typhoon.

Dragonflies
in the impetuous wind
uncontrollable

Keith Evetts awoke to a strong wind in Thames Ditton, U.K.

wind-blown grass
I like you wild
in the morning

Terrie Jacks saw switchgrass turn shades of deep red on the summertime prairies near Ballwin, Missouri.

fire grass
wave after wave
of red hair

Paul Callus admired nature’s strategic flexibility in Safi, Malta.

resilience--
rippling wheat
bends with the wind

Marilyn Ward smiled affectionately at a windproof hairdo in Scunthorpe, England. Hifsa Ashraf tried a traditional hair treatment for dry, frizzy and dull hair in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

bus stop queue...
defying the breeze
grannie’s new perm

* * *

winter sunlight
applying mustard oil
to granny’s hair

Deborah A. Bennett was tempted to take a moonlight swim in Carbondale, Illinois.

in pale moonlight
the lake the lake the lake
honeysuckle scent

Chandran didn’t mind getting wet.

in each drop
of this rain...
the scent of Indian ocean

Murasaki Sagano sprang to her Tokyo high-rise window with a camera to create a photo-haiku about what a typhoon left behind.

Morning rainbow
in pajamas at the balcony
cellphone’s click

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

Take the plunge and write a haiku at http://www.asahi.com/ajw/special/haiku/. The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears Sept. 30. 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 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 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 The International University of Kagoshima, 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: “Teaching and Learning Haiku in English” (2022); “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).