the perfume of immortal flowers--the old cemetery
--Francoise Maurice (Draguignan, France)

* * *

moth orchids greet us
first showing their best colors
Mom’s last birthday
--Kiyoshi Fukuzawa (Tokyo)

* * *

Gardenia
too sweet for the wake
a dear friend
--Satoru Kanematsu (Nagoya)

* * *

two black horses
leading along the old road
the sad procession
--Slobodan Pupovac (Zagreb, Croatia)

* * *

night storm
the centaurs gallop
amongst the coastal rocks
--Eugeniusz Zacharski (Darlowo, Poland)

* * *

in the mirror
my aging face stares back...
“not so bad”
--Orrin Prejean (Dallas, Texas)

* * *

he must be dreaming--
stone Buddha in the shade
of purple sunflowers
--Ksenia Alessandra Petrova (Mexico City)

* * *

to the planted seed
what seems like a burial
is a beginning
--Noga Shemer (Storrs, Connecticut)

* * *

wheat field...
the child she couldn’t
have
--Samo Kreutz (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

* * *

Born and raised
in a rainy gravesite
a toadstool
--Teiichi Suzuki (Osaka)

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

Hiroshima
war orphans chewing
newspaper
--Yutaka Kitajima (Joetsu, Niigata)

The haikuist marked A-Bomb Day by praying for the children who starved to death after the “Little Boy” exploded. Ian Willey marked Mountain Day by realizing he’s fortunate to be living within sight of both bountiful seas and mountains in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture.

mountain shrine
and me with nothing
to offer

Living high in the mountain village of Golnik, Slovenia, Tanja Trcek embarked on a make-believe maritime adventure.

her sea
in the rusty bucket--
mountain child’s summer

Giuliana Ravaglia shared her thoughts. Richa Sharma found answers.

evening breeze...
the mountains light up
and the thoughts

* * *

mountain sunset
I balance the unknown
stones of answers

Following the Buddhist custom of honoring the spirits of one’s ancestors, Suzuki likely visited his parents’ grave to celebrate the Obon holidays in Eiheiji, Fukui Prefecture.

A rush of cool air--
thinking about a visit
to the hometown grave

Writing from Kent, Washington, Sherry Reniker remembered the Kamakura period Buddhist priest who was banished to Sado Island from 1271 to 1274. According to doctrinal writings, his prayers went unheeded during a series of typhoons, floods and earthquakes that shook the island. He endured famine, rampant plague and fear-provoking comet sightings.

on Sado
Nichiren observed
an inner Milky Way

Masumi Orihara commented on “Sado Island’s sad history of exiles who must have wished upon the falling stars.”

a falling star
waves wailing
exile island

Inspired by Zen, Florin Golban composed this haiku in Bucharest, Romania.

after the sunset
looking up to
what’s not there

Govind Joshi composed this thought in Dehradun, India.

El Nino
the monsoon
we will never have

While reading a haiku about the Milky Way in Matsuo Basho’s travelogue, Anna Goluba began to daydream in Warsaw, Poland. She dreamed she was choosing flowers from heaven for the grave of someone who had been very close. Those flowers were magical: stronger, taller and more colorful than those from her neighborhood flower market. Awakening from her dream, she concluded that meteors are heaven’s flowers and symbolize the soul. The body dies, but life never ends.

Meteor shower
above the concrete jungle
heaven’s flowers

Eva Limbach posed this rhetorical line in Saarbruecken, Germany: how deep is the ocean falling star

Watching old stars spin from east to west in the skies overhead Parma, Italy, Mario Massimo Zontini’s eyes tried to follow the trail of those that fell.

dark night of summer--
the stars plunge into the river
with no ripple

Petra Schmidt beachcombed near Catonsville, Maryland. Al Gallia witnessed a slow death in Lafayette, Louisiana. Kanematsu felt a little guilty boosting his stamina by eating grilled eel and hunting for Sirius in the Canis Major constellation on a hot, sultry evening.

warm ocean current
a starfish hugs
the shoreline

* * *

dry water hole
the gator crawls slowly
over decaying fish

* * *

Eels listed
endangered species
Dog Day’s feast

John Daleiden composed this rhetorical question during the relative nighttime cool of the Sonoran Desert. Daytime temperatures this summer have been dangerously hot--soaring past 45 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona.

Do you suppose
beyond heaven’s river
they watch too?

Lynda Zwinger shivered on a warm night in Tucson, Arizona.

across the desert
smiling mountain--coyote
laughs in the moonlight

Hoping to cool down on a humid night, Kanematsu’s grandson tiptoed through a haunted house. Murasaki Sagano shivered while listening to a ghost story in Tokyo.

Terrified
by his own shadow
--rookie ghost

* * *

Midsummer
a breathtaking story
psychic night

Marek Printer spent a thrilling night in Kielce, Poland, reading the 2020 sci-fi novel, “Heaven’s River” by Dennis E. Taylor. The haikuist ai li penned an unexpected encounter in Singapore.

distant storm
my cat purring
on my lap

* * *

heaven must
have sent you
purring kitty

Jennifer Gurney figuratively became a bird in Broomfield, Colorado. Isabella Kramer thought she might have returned from the dead as a soft sea creature.

floating on a cloud
high above the mountains
a bird, I gaze below

* * *

underwater fog
suddenly I meet myself
as an octopus

Xenia Tran mourned the loss of a whole pod of cetaceans that beached on a Scottish island last month. An even larger number of long-finned whales died at Cheynes Beach on the southern tip of Western Australia.

heaven’s tears--
fifty-five pilot whales
stranded on Lewis

Chen Xiaoou contrasted vibrant sounds on Dian Lake in Kunming, China.

sea gulls
the sound of wings
between that of the waves

Superstitious by nature, Mircea Moldovan tread on a black line in Jibou, Romania: stepping with right foot over the crow’s shadow

Tomislav Maretic gawked at a very long-legged bird in Zagreb, Croatia. Luciana Moretto teetered in Venice, Italy. Zdenka Mlinar vacillated in Velika Gorica, Croatia. Christopher Calvin swayed back and forth over his choice of words in Kota Mojokerto, Indonesia.

a heron and its
reflection in the pond, perched
on the same leg

* * *

drought
flood... balancing
on one leg

* * *

fire yesterday
flood today
cat on the roof

* * *

change of tide
parched earth tastes
re(new)al

Shemer shared a withering love story from Storrs, Connecticut.

this midsummer love
first unfurling, now curling
under the bright sun

Maurice described ripe corn cobs swaying in the sun.

roaring waves
stretching across the silk tassels
of the cornfields
Helen Buckingham eyed terraced mountains.

row
upon row of rice
gathered in prayer

Wai Mei Wong admits that ever since she “was a kid,” growing up in Toronto, Ontario, she’s “always had an eerie imagination about dolls.”

rocking chair
the doll’s eyes
open and shut

Writing from Ettiswil, Switzerland, Helga Stania paused to consider an abstract mural painted in 1958 by Mark Rothko.

Four Darks in Red
two lovers
hand in hand

Orihara took pity on a widower who admired his fashion-minded wife until the day she died, when he had to dispose of all her possessions.

treasured
blushing-pink wardrobe
heavy burden

Stephen J. DeGuire’s haiku alludes to the eerie blue light seen in bioluminescent crustaceans such as the hotaru ebi found in Lake Suwa.

treasures crash
onto rocky shores--
firefly shrimp

Keith Evetts composed this haiku on the longest day of the year.

the last little bluetit
clings to the nest box
all day long

Schmidt caught sight of something hiding behind seaweed in cool shallow waters. Mike Fainzilber drank tea as hot as the ocean in Rehovot, Israel.

in the kelp bed
something stirring
from afar

* * *

gently steaming
my teacup
and the broad blue sea

Maurice stuck to this line penned in her travel itinerary: raspberries ripe-- I will leave tomorrow at dawn

Randy Brooks might have been feeling a little guilty raising his hand to adjust the air nozzle on an airplane’s overhead bin during a westward flight from Taylorville, Illinois.

jumbo jet over El Nino
the hiss of
air conditioning

Kanematsu felt as though he had been happily on his way to heaven by spaceship.

Woke safely
from a midday nap
on the earth

In a written note, Moretto suggested a dreamlike composition be played for a divine requiem--as “music for my funeral.”

shadow of time...
listening to
Lacrimosa by Mozart

Matsuo Basho wrote this last poem for his disciples from his deathbed (jisei) in Osaka four days before passing away on Nov. 28, 1694: tabi ni yande yume wa kareno wo kakemeguru

sick on a journey
my dreams go on wandering
through these withered fields

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

The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear on Sept. 1, 15 and 29. Readers are invited to compose haiku related to Matsuo Basho’s final verse: sick on a journey my dreams go on wandering through these withered fields. Send haiku 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 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).