egret white coats the pond, the next one too
--Helga Stania (Ettiswil, Switzerland)

* * *

Returning
snow white ibises
to Sado
--Satoru Kanematsu (Nagoya)

* * *

one by one,
the turkey buzzards return...
lingering snow
--Joshua Gage (Cleveland, Ohio)

* * *

snow-free December
forest feeds the deer
I feed my dark mood
--Nuri Rosegg (Oslo, Norway)

* * *

winter flu--
the endless white of
my notebook
--Alexander Groth (Neuenkirchen, Germany)

* * *

breathing it all in
cold-brewed winter
morn
--Roberta Beach Jacobson (Indianola, Iowa)

* * *

broken branches
making him a hot chocolate
for a start
--Marie Derley (Ath, Belgium)

* * *

Mueller’s electric tea kettle:
skipping two stages of boiling
right to the ‘wild billows’
--Patrick Sweeney (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

* * *

deep snow--
the daruma doll’s
unpainted eye
--Farah Ali (Brighton, England)

* * *

Illusionist’s eyes
I sure will not follow them
he sure knows I will
--Horst Ludwig (Seattle, Washington)

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

alone by the spring
that stirred me and this river
I write my last line
--James Penha (Bali, Indonesia)

The haikuist marked the Nov. 28 death of Matsuo Basho in 1694. Tsanka Shishkova offered this line from Sofia, Bulgaria: deep darkness in my dream the day dawns

Groth embraced a child in the throes of a seizure, perhaps caused by a fever, who was turning blue.

febrile convulsion--
this cozy coldness
of your hugs

Visiting from Osaka, Charles Smith wrote this haiku while thinking about an exhibition of photographs entitled “Human Shadow Etched in Stone” at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

extra sun
sidewalk silhouette
still remains

Dennis Woolbright coached 14-year-old Bao Le in Vietnam, who goes by the penname Ernest, to compose this haiku in English.

Soft breeze,
dying banyan tree,
stay singing sparrows

A drop of sleet fell on John Hawkhead in Bradford on Avon.

sprinkling earth
a chaffinch releases
its song of rain

Huffman calmed her nerves while driving down the road in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

wipers swish swipe
hypnotic erasure
abusive spouse

Writing from snow-covered mountains in Joetsu, Niigata Prefecture, Yutaka Kitajima composed a haiku based on Kenji Miyazawa’s 1922 poem “Eiketsu no Asa” about his sister Toshiko murmuring “Get me some sleet, please” (ameyuju totechite kenja) before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Her final faint smile
over fresh sleet in the bowl...
heavenly ice cream

Stania was chilled listening to Franz Schubert’s 1827 piano sonata in the cold and dark landscape of her winter home.

Winterreise
the gentle waves
of the lake

The cold abruptly silenced J.L. Huffman’s garden concert leaving her deck scattered with dead katydids. A fiddlers’ green alludes to an after-life where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing and dancers who never tire.

cold snap
green fiddlers frozen
symphony silenced

On a visit to Mexico, David Cox recoiled at the touch of something misconceived. Govind Joshi mourned in Dehradun, India.

iron railing
thin lizard becomes
a leaf

* * *

with his death--
leaving the earth
a white moth

Commenting on a work of improvisation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Jerome Berglund riffed on the most interesting-looking moth in the world that was first described by the British entomologist Frederic Moore in 1882.

Picasso moth
grand architecture
means bad policy

Mirela Brailean grieves the discordance between now and then in Iasi, Romania.

the end of the year
on mom’s wall calendar
it’s still summer

Ian Willey experienced season creep, the postponement of what would have been a normal encounter for late summer until late November. The haikuist said, “it was a weird moment--my shift at an end, the mosquito’s just starting, both of us out of sorts and slow.”

finished for the day
I follow a mosquito
down the dark stairwell

John Pappas shrugged his shoulders and disappeared underground in Boston, Massachusetts.

year’s end--
down subway stairs
winter rain

T’Kelah Smith’s spoken verse turned white overnight in Tchula, Mississippi.

stale cold
nipping at my nose
glimpse of breath

Kanematsu heard all kinds of sounds outside his kitchen window.

Hearing aid
amplified farewell
last crickets

* * *

Deep autumn--
the next door neighbor
unemployed

On visit from Portugal, Diana Silver penned this haiku while traveling across Japan.　 Kathabela Wilson restored herself during a Japanese cultural meeting at Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden in Pasadena, California.

Stratocumulus
Colourless morning in bed
Outside gold leaf falls

* * *

this kintsugi life
so many breaks now
my heart turns gold

Kiyoshi Fukuzawa penned this haiku while convalescing in Tokyo and thinking about his youth spent in Arab countries.

Dark clouds all over
I miss the Arabian sands
hospital window

John Zheng drove through Nashville.

thanksgiving trip
more dead deer
along interstate

Tanja Trcek hiked an autumn trail with a partner in Golnik, Slovenia. Mircea Moldovan spotted a white fur coat in Letca, Romania. Anne-Marie McHarg strolled through the campus of Queen Mary University of London.

scruffy old fox
let’s go on, slowly
on our rickety legs

* * *

a white rabbit
on the endless expanse
first snow

* * *

A meditative walk
Through shadowy trees
Autumn moon

Murasaki Sagano was drawn to a secretive place away from prying eyes in Tokyo.

Autumn tints
taking me aside
a stalemate

Levko Dovgan felt melancholic while hunting for red leaves in Lviv, Ukraine.

momijigari
morning frost
made me sad

Shishkova brush-stroked this line at home: painting moonlit red maple leaves in a glass vase

When deciduous trees take on autumnal colors, the evergreen bamboos become freshly green as if it were spring. McHarg mixed and matched sprays of yellow and green. Kitajima pruned in Joetsu, Niigata Prefecture. Cox pulled down the earflaps on a fur-lined cap.

Green bamboo foliage
And a winter jasmine
Ikebana

* * *

Evergreen bonsai
arranged on the porch--
ready for winter

* * *

green barley shoots
it’s the season for
tourist hats

Not allowing anyone to hurry her, Sagano masked her sadness.

Autumn roses
obscure my sorrow
in my own time

Dwelling on her autumn of life in Tokyo, Junko Saeki wrote: “as I approach the end of my journey, memories of people who accepted me and gave me unconditional love and helped me believe in myself and others, flood my thoughts.”

high skies of autumn
faces of people
dearest to me

Arvinder Kaur never had a chance to say goodbye in Chandigarh, India.

the son
who never returned
withered grasses

With no chance to sprout, Berglund suggested he was nonetheless satisfied.

seedless fruit
making a nice
dry painting

John Hamley has lived a good life in Marmora, Ontario. Sagano plans to tend her garden until the end. Luminita Suse brushed snowflakes off velvety red rose petals in Ottawa, Canada.

Feel the wind
this withered field
has seen it all

* * *

See to it
that a red rose still blooms
the end of the year

* * *

embracing
the first snow
late roses

Early this morning, as she does every morning, Nazarena Rampini admired her little winter garden in Pogliano Milanese, Italy.

December
with thin blades of frost
the embroidered pine

Natalia Kuznetsova sat by her father’s bedside in Moscow, Russia.

on his deathbed
dad asks about his roses...
falling leaves

If Mario Massimo Zontini were able to choose, he knows when he would like to lay his head down on a satin pillow and dream forever in Parma, Italy.

when my time comes
be it early in the year
when the wintersweet blooms

“The Pillow Book” (Makura no Soshi) penned by Sei Shonagon in 1002 during the Heian Period (794-1185) is a list of musings about such as things as those who have lost their power: “A woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains.”

Hawkhead conjured this line of snow: pillow talk dreams of snow clouds

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

The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear on Dec. 15 and 29. Readers are invited to send haiku about those who have lost their power 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).