embroidery a string a spider weaves one-line poem
--Dorna Hainds (Lapeer, Michigan)

* * *

up on top
of beautiful blue blooms
last year’s kite
--Christina Chin (Kuching, Borneo)

* * *

a blue house
leaning against the hill
them hand in hand
--Jean-Hughes Chevy (Paris, France)

* * *

for you
every cornflower
within this sky
--Joanna Ashwell (Durham, England)

* * *

flowering aloe
fairy lights
above the patio
--Jerome Berglund (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

* * *

a tide of bluebells
gives woods their annual blue-rinse--
floods them with fragrance…
--Alan Maley (Canterbury, England)

* * *

pentecost
Molly Bloom decides
to confess the truth
--Eugeniusz Zacharski (Radom, Poland)

* * *

laughs blue
his heavenly gaze--
serene dawn
--Giuliana Ravaglia (Bologna, Italy)

* * *

spring in a window frame
she tells the weather goddess
come make my blossoms bloom
--Liz Gibbs (Calgary, Alberta)

* * *

sunset
birds fly away with the last
of the blue
--Roberta Beach Jacobson (Indianola, Iowa)

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

new saijiki--
the thickest of five volumes
blue shade for summer
--Masumi Orihara (Atsugi, Kanagawa)

The haikuist recently bought a season word almanac (saijiki) to help her compose haiku. It came as a five-volume set, in different colors for each of the four seasons plus New Year’s. She noted “the summer version is the thickest and is a summery blue.” In today’s column there are many different shades of blue.

On May 16, 1689, haiku master Matsuo Basho traveled by boat up the Sumida river in Tokyo. Disembarking at Senju, he began a five-month, 2,400-kilometer journey around Japan. A friend had outfitted him with sandals fastened by blue cords. So, in his account of the trek, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” Basho composed: Ayamegusa asi ni musuban waraji no o (I will bind iris blossoms around my feet--cords for my sandals).

Apsara Dilrukshi Perera watched a traveler’s conical straw-hat fade on the horizon in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Sedge hat
in a faraway boat
moving downriver

Satoru Kanematsu marked the centenary of a welcome ceremony held at Meiji Shrine for 12,739 colorfully costumed clay dolls that were shipped along with messages from American children to Yokohama to promote Japan-U.S. friendship. Chevy imagined making a Godzilla doll fashioned from the gigantic blue buds and bluish-purple tinged flowers of Magnolia acuminata.

Blue-eyed dolls
one hundred years old
peach blossoms

* * *

magnolia blossoms
blue Gojira released
a ladybug

While driving in Parma, Italy, Mario Massimo Zontini passed the time by playing a rhyming game named “I spy with my little eye, something that is blue.”

braving the traffic
some blue irises have bloomed
along the road

When O.R. Melling heard that her companion lost her son at the age of 30 last year, she penned a haiku prefaced by this eulogy: “She walks alone, carrying her grief to the Cathedral in the west. We share a deep look.”

You don’t weep alone
Walking the road of Saint James
We share your burden

Urszula Marciniak wiped a tear in Lodz, Poland.

the end of spring
a stork without a female
adds moss to the nest

At a hostel in Najera, Spain, Melling heard from “an elderly man with a beatific face coming to serenade the pilgrims as the lights go out. His voice resonates with a profound love and joy. This is a gift he gives freely and nightly.” May he rest in peace.

Descanze en paz
Angel-voiced Julio
Who now sings to God

Olivier-Gabriel Humbert heard from heaven above in Les Avenieres, France. Lynda Zwinger’s heartstrings were pulled in Tucson, Arizona.

spring fog
somewhere an orchestra of birds
cow soloist near me

* * *

overhead the crow
wings moving heaven and earth--
the heartbeat of air

Avoiding toxic pods and seeds, Barbara Anna Gaiardoni made a tempura of blue flowers in Verona, Italy.

frying
wisteria flowers…
her tummy

Monica Kakkar turned off her smartphone, television and computer.

digital detox…
a bubble in the hot spring
a Welsh onion head

Maley tickled sweet nectar from a fragrant flower.

first honeysuckle,
uncurling its purple toes
to welcome spring sun ...

Mark Gilbert watched as spring caught up with the cherry blossoms in Nottingham, U.K.

cherish blossom
the sky turning
pinkish blue

Ramona Linke heard purple rain in Beesenstedt, Germany.

lilac
eavesdrop on the colors
of silence

C. Jean Downer welcomed an iridescent purple feathered tiny bird--whose blue and red feathers were blended in an ultraviolet light--in White Rock, British Columbia.

in a quiet yard
hummingbird returns
dogwood in bloom

Marilyn Humbert waved goodbye from Sydney, Australia.

screeching
seagulls skim breakers
last days of spring

Lilia Racheva welcomed a summer sky to Rousse, Bulgaria. Helga Stania welcomed a long-distance flyer to Ettiswil, Switzerland.

A kite,
draws blue
from the sky

* * *

at the edge of galaxy
the long journey
of a bluethroat

Kanematsu admired soaring birds with dark, glossy-blue backs. Michael Feil waited for blue jays to perch on a birdhouse in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

Swallows stray--
temple gate open
all the time

* * *

happy Friday sun
the starlings get to feeders first
blue Jays sleeping late

J.D. Nelson wasn’t kept waiting long in Lafayette, Colorado.

time to feed peanuts
to the squirrels & the hens--
here comes a blue jay!

* * *

the pale blue berries
on the big juniper bush
two blue jays trade calls

C.X. Turner admired a blue bug in Birmingham, England. Teiichi Suzuki reveled in the sea at springtime.

etched in glass--
vibrations of the blue
dragonfly

* * *

Auspicious spring day
free and open Pacific
bluefin tunas swim

Pamela A. Babusci might have been singing the rhyme “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” in Rochester, New York.

early spring
tilling the soil
with a borrowed hoe

Terri Thorfinnson created a xeriscape with blue-colored indigenous drought resistant plants that don’t need to be watered in semi-arid West Sacramento, California.

My garden
wild roses, sage, jades
reach for the sun

Horst Ludwig is ready to hoist a newly designed flag at the end of this month.

Minnesota flag
blue and light-blue now and with
its star to follow

Julie Bloss Kelsey carefully measured a worn earthen slope in Germantown, Maryland.

between fallen stones
of a retaining wall
the centipede’s stride

On a beautiful early summer day in Dehradun, India, Govind Joshi’s friend was admiring the way he “swept his brush daintily back and forth--stepped back to note the effect--added a touch here and there” in a manner befitting Mark Twain’s series “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876), the friend may very well have pleaded “let me whitewash a little, too.”

painting the gate
a friend
drops by

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The next issue of the Asahi Haikuist Network appears on May 31. You are invited to send a haiku about something delicious that melts in your mouth, like a snail, clam, oyster, or even an octopus. Send postcards to David McMurray at the International University of Kagoshima, Sakanoue 8-34-1, Kagoshima, 891-0197, Japan, or e-mail (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).