tracing the Wild Atlantic Way one Irish rover
--William Scott Galasso (Laguna Woods, California)

* * *

first snow
the new kitten’s soft touch
on my palm
--Anna Yin (Mississauga, Canada)

* * *

fire works
puppy hides
under the couch
--Apsara Dilrukshi Perera (Colombo, Sri Lanka)

* * *

New Year’s morning
just me and my dog walking
the empty streets
--Urszula Marciniak (Lodz, Poland)

* * *

courting cats
crash across the rooftop…
rain that comes and goes
--Kyle Sullivan (Kaohsiung, Taiwan)

* * *

rainswept parking lot--
beneath the lone car
a stray
--Chris Langer (Stephenville, Texas)

* * *

Twelve-hour shift
harvester howls from
barking dogs
--Stephen J. DeGuire (Los Angeles, California)

* * *

home from work
the dog offers to change
one leash for another
--Eric A. Lohman (Powder Springs, Georgia)

* * *

scent of Chianti--
a dog wags its tail
for the croquettes
--Mauro Battini (Pisa, Italy)

* * *

snow, blurring the grass,
freaking the hedgerow’s bleak sticks,
whiskering the dog
--Alan Maley (Canterbury, U.K.)

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

Burns’ “poor beastie”
hosts a festival of flies--
my cat’s killing field
--Carl Brennan (New York)

The haikuist plans to celebrate the Jan. 25 birthday of Robert Burns (1759-1796), a farmer who coined the phrase “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an men” in a poem after accidently plowing up the nest of a field mouse. Here are the final three lines of “To a Mouse” penned in Scottish dialect:

On prospects drear!
An forward, tho I canna see,
I guess an fear!

Located just 100 kilometers from the epicenter of the magnitude-7.6 earthquake in the Noto Peninsula region of Ishikawa Prefecture which struck New Year’s Day, Yutaka Kitajima said his home in Joetsu, Niigata Prefecture, “shook madly… and it crossed my mind that I might be killed if it collapsed… but I tumbled outside.”

Aftershocks...
the wooden house creaks
freezing night

Reading the news in Panchkula, India, Vandana Parashar hoped that many survivors would be found safe and uninjured, but feared the worst.

earthquakes
as if war
wasn’t enough

Flemming Laugaard recalled a tragedy at sea in Denmark.

The wave came quickly
tumbling the ship around
My captain is lost

Padraig O’Morain stooped to read a soggy note in the rain in Dublin, Ireland.

in the flooded gutter
a torn off page
blue ink: Urgent.

Admitting, “it worries me a little… one day we may live on a narrow island,” Karen Harvey isn’t taking chances at her second-floor apartment in Pwllheli, Wales.

seafront home
row boat tied up at the rear
just in case

Fernanda Binati believes in experiential learning.

Listening to chime
Too many things to take in--
A fish learns to swim

Kitajima seems to have brightened up--but he said he was still hypersensitive to aftershocks when cleaning up debris amid daily earthquakes and inclement weather.

Christmas rose
blooming... gloomy porch
--against leaden skies

Justice Joseph Prah watched the first sunbeams enter Accra, Ghana.

border signpost
“No Trespassing”
the new year crosses

A frequent contributor to this column, Adjei Agyei-Baah passed away Dec. 18, 2023, while studying for a doctorate degree in New Zealand. This posthumously published haiku is the last one submitted to this column by the talented Ghanian poet.

fishless day
the fisherman’s shadow
part of a rock

Alan York suggested that “vivid images and a philosophical attitude towards the world around us will not leave poetry connoisseurs indifferent.” Writing from Bucharest, Romania, Florian Munteanu suggested we keep moving even when we feel as if the universe is indifferent.

A fisherman
pulls out his net as if he wants
to catch the moon

* * *

Our earthly life,
rolling and rolling, again, stone
to the abyss

Tomislav Maretic walked to Lake Jarun in Zagreb, Croatia, and saw “the first swans appear in the darkness of water.”

first light
on the wings of swans...
New Year’s Day

The haikuist petro c. k. went for a morning walk in Seattle, Washington. Eva Limbach’s first walk of the year in Saarbruecken, Germany, passed through colorful scenes of yesteryear. John Zheng was out walking past sundown in Itta Bena, Mississippi.

passing clouds
in between the fence slats
a dog’s bark

* * *

New Year’s walk--
on my way the leaves
of days gone by

* * *

street puddle
a skinny dog slurps
red sunset

Luciana Moretto celebrated the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto (1921-2011) who was born, lived and died near topinambur wild sunflowers.

Jerusalem artichokes
along the Soligo river...
the poet’s walk

Kanematsu can no longer walk as fast as he used to.

Fallen leaves
overtake runners
windy race

Yoshinobu Kubo, a student of psychology, won an honorable mention in a haiku contest held at Kagawa University in Tokushima Prefecture. According to judge Ian Willey, his haiku demonstrated the “show, don’t tell” principle of haiku writing.

Red maple leaves
fall in the wind
outside a hospital room

Listening to the same classical music at home all day long in South Riding, Virginia, Monica Kakkar was delighted when the postman brought her a New Year’s greeting from Japan. Kanchan Chatterjee got a card in Jamshedpur, India.

playlist on repeat…
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
stirs New Year postcards

* * *

winter seclusion--
a New Year’s postcard arrives
with red blossom stamps

Beethoven’s Ninth symphony has become a beloved New Year’s tradition ever since it was played in 1914 by German prisoners of World War I. The POW’s “Bando orchestra” performed the piece on a makeshift stage inside a soldier’s camp in Naruto, Tokushima Prefecture. Murasaki Sagano made enough rations to feed an army.

This stew I cooked
better than usual
Beethoven’s Ninth

After the war ended, the former POWs performed the Ninth outside the prison walls for an appreciative audience. Kanematsu swayed from its first movement to the last movement as if it were a symbolic journey that ended in bells ringing 108 times. Masumi Orihara simply beamed.

New Year’s Eve
Beethoven’s Ninth, then
temple bells

* * *

Lengthy overture
broken by the cymbals
the year’s first sunrise

Teiichi Suzuki loves listening to the natural tones of musical instruments made from wood.

Winter sounds
from the quiet woods--
a cello

Ana Drobot might have a playful design to make in Bucharest, Romania.

wood dragon--
another toy I started
to dream of

Rima Leipuviene rejoiced with family in Vilnius, Lithuania.

morning snow
in pure whiteness
daughter’s song

Francis Attard donated a coin to wish everyone a good 2024. Langer jingled coins. Antoinette Cheung found it hard to catch the gist of words flowing around a table in Vancouver, British Columbia. Jerome Berglund played cards in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

year-end charities
weasel on an old Maltese coin
at the auction

* * *

local market--
a language I don’t know
in my pocket change

* * *

motherland
half of each conversation
understood

* * *

scraping ante
to get dealt in
seed catalogue

Richa Sharma was comforted by the aroma of home-cooking in Delhi, India: gentler in my hometown cooker whistles

Francoise Maurice waits for spring to visit Draguignan, France.

end of visits
sitting behind the bay window
she looks at winter

Anne-Marie McHarg’s line of sight moved rhythmically with the flow of an ink brush.

Up down the strokes flow
The monk’s first haiku is inked
Spring calligraphy

Anna Goluba noticed people cowering in Warsaw, Poland.

Anthropocene
Even creatures without shells
Hide inside them deeply

Lohman followed this line until it disappeared without trace: legacy of man footprints in snow

Leipuviene got stuck in the mud.

frozen soil
doesn’t go anywhere
yesterday’s footprint

Taking her boots off after an autumn walk down the street to the shops in Coimbra, Portugal, Diana Silver noted “humour is Buddhist, after all.”

Golden drifts of leaves
Hide unwelcome messages
Barely dried dog scat

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

The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear Feb. 2 and 16. Readers are invited to send haiku about dragons 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).