piercing the meadow colors a falcon’s silence
--Helga Stania (Ettiswil, Switzerland)

* * *

the hawk has visited,
leaving his calling card-- this
starburst of feathers…
--Alan Maley (Canterbury, England)

* * *

Blithe summer
on grandson’s tanned face
a fresh scratch
--Satoru Kanematsu (Nagoya)

* * *

the cicadas’ song
fades into nightfall…
screeching owl
--Corine Timmer (Faro, Portugal)

* * *

ocean--
the end of the mile-long
way of the river
--Zelyko Funda (Varazdin, Croatia)

* * *

seagulls soar
in an ocean of blue sky
home is everywhere
--Marilyn Henighan (Ottawa, Ontario)

* * *

a summer cottage
by the lake--wild roses shape
its reflection
--Nuri Rosegg (Oslo, Norway)

* * *

under the rose arch
confiding our secrets
cicadas
--Rosemarie Schuldes (Mattsee, Austria)

* * *

whispers among
the old wind chimes
passing summer
--Milan Rajkumar (Imphal, India)

* * *

owl shriek--
breaking through
the full moon
--Ana Drobot (Bucharest, Romania)

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

silent heron
commotion mid-air
squawk
--Mary L. Leopkey (Texada Island, British Columbia)

The haikuist looked skyward to see what was happening. Kanematsu was surprised, and perhaps saddened, by the news that the U.S. president won’t run for re-election. Next month, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida plans to visit the White House before stepping down. His wife Yuko Kishida and First Lady Jill Biden exchanged haiku with high school students during the prime minister’s previous state visit.

Bye, Biden--
baffled endeavor
sunset glow

Sadat Sayem mailed a haiku from Dhaka, where Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned after weeks of student protests.

The road is empty
Closely you look and find there
Footprints aplenty

Marek Kozubek and Sankamnerd, respectively, composed these haiku in Bangkok, Thailand, on the day Paetongtarn Shinawatra was elected as the new prime minister.

summer heat--
in a linden’s shadow
the scent of freedom

* * *

Flames of Death,
Flame of Hope,
Still shine

In today’s column, haikuists juxtapose the ease of raptors soaring on heat thermals with the glacial pace of politicians facing crises. Patricia Hawkhead sighed blissfully in Bradford on Avon, U.K.

moment gone
a breeze winds its way
from our heat

Yutaka Kitajima stirred from a fitful dream about a bald eagle. He had been ruminating about American politics and the French revolution depicted in Eugene Delacroix’s masterpiece painted in 1830, when suddenly he heard the laughing whip-poor-will sounds that a nighthawk made in Joetsu, Niigata Prefecture.

Weary parody
of Delacroix’s Liberty
--chuckles a nightjar

Writing from Draguignan, France, Francoise Maurice invoked the soldiers who fell on D-Day in Provence.

American cemetery
an old woman and her fan
in the shade of a tree

Leah Ann Sullivan wrote in remembrance of her late grandfather, a World War I veteran from Grafton, Massachusetts.

a halt in the march
a frail soldier salutes
our front porch

Padraig O’Morain peered down into the Grand Canal in Dublin, Ireland, to see what was causing a hissy fit. Richard L. Matta marveled at the ability to fly in San Diego, California.

Monday morning tram
this year’s clumsy cygnets
crowd the canal

* * *

flightless
…and yet
women’s high jump

Arvinder Kaur teared up in Chandigarh India. Eric Kimura had no answers for a nestling sparrow that had fallen to the ground in Mililani, Hawaii.

war casualties
a mourning dove
cries and cries

* * *

Wings and legs splayed wide
Unseeing eyes yet asking
Fledgling’s last question

Haikuists seek immediate answers for rising prices, rising temperatures and rising threats of war. Member of the Greater Delta Haiku Society in West Sacramento, California, Terri Thorfinnson implied he lives in constant dread.

unpaid bills
keeps me working long past
retirement

Charlie Smith worked hard to lower the costs of groceries in Raleigh, North Carolina. The haikuist bemoaned shrinkflation when U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris pledged to curtail price-gouging at an event held in Smith’s hometown on Friday, Aug. 16.

garden chores
taller tomato stakes
dragonfly’s delight

* * *

Ten-inch footlong
submarine sandwich
Friday special

Kanematsu felt a hot blast echo from the crowd during an election campaign.

Rebounding
Trump’s roar “U.S.A.”
scorching heat

Monica Kakkar prayed in the searing heat of Varanasi, India. Roberta Beach Jacobson found a cool place to debate politics in Indianola, Iowa.

caucus at cockcrow
eddies the lingering heat--
Ganges burning ghat

* * *

election heating up
we meet under the old oak
to debate

Writing from Los Angeles, California, Susan Rogers proposed a solution after a storm passed.

typhoon prices
instead of roses and cake
just curry and rice

The rising “temperature in Thailand is very, very hot in the area” where Vasu Sankamnerd lives, and “the coral bleaching… is a very bad situation and very sad news for the people and the environment.”

Blue sky with few white,
Blue ocean with white,
Blue, bad situation

The noontime heat in Kansas City, Missouri, made Pippa Philips’s ears ring: heat dome a tin can syncopating the pavement

Ever the calculating mathematician, Smith steadily sailed a deltoid-shaped kite higher in an autumnal breeze atop a quartz dome near Atlanta, Georgia. Kimura ducked his head momentarily and passed through a rectangular-shaped cotton curtain at a Japanese shopfront entrance.

Stone Mountain
long arduous climb
to fly new kite

* * *

Far Pacific gust
Sweeps down a mountain then
Gently sways noren

Nicoletta Ignatti watched with a sense of foreboding when a huge flock of black birds suddenly changed direction in Castellana Grotte, Italy.

murmuration--
the sinuous shadows
on the rolling hills

Kakkar watched the morning sky turn from purple to blue overhead Shimla, India.

brimful of blurple--
wake up to campanula
bats-in-the-belfry

Joanna Ashwell held her breath as long as she could in Durham, England.

holding on
to a piece of sky
the river’s tide

Kimberly Kuchar held her ears in Austin, Texas. Richard Bailly’s ears rang in Fargo, North Dakota. Rosegg tried to laugh off the heat.

boiling heat
the pressure building
in my skull

* * *

cicadas
singing
telephone wire

* * *

ringing ears aching heads
laughing down ruined lives
the busy streets

Jagajit Salam dizzily swirled and tossed coins to street vendors and performers at a bazaar in Imphal, India.

lively market
mingling with the spiel
a busker

Ken Sawitri watched the slow give-and-take strategy of board game players in Blora, Indonesia.

old batik shop
the pedicab man playing chess
with a foreign guest

Haikuists invoked Hamlet’s line “the insolence of office,” which Shakespeare penned circa 1600 to describe procrastination and the disrespectful behavior of government leaders. Maley counted to three. Realizing that history always repeats itself, Kitajima now fears “insanity is going to prevail.”

just three small letters:
W, A, R. -- madness --
psychopaths at play...

* * *

War Crimes Trial...
the word “hang” still sounds
harsh in my heart

John Paul Caponigro heard the boom but hadn’t seen a warning light in Cushing, Maine.

piercing the silence
thunder without lightning
some thoughts never come

Masumi Orihara’s said her “ears were so numbed by the roaring falls that I felt a strange sense of serenity.”

Serenity
ears numb at the plunge basin
Niagara Falls

Drobot wrote this haiku with both feet firmly planted on the ground.

a swan lands
piercing the sun--
evening

Dorota Kasparewicz in Szczecin, Poland, and Mel Goldberg in Ajijic, Mexico, respectively swayed. Mona Bedi returned safely to Delhi, India.

in the garden
in the hammock
I swing the clouds

* * *

between two trees
the hammock
sways in shadow

* * *

summer cottage
my hammock travels
to the moon and back

Stephen J. DeGuire tried throwing a bone in Los Angeles. Eva Limbach’s dog kicked up the grass with its hind legs in Saarbruecken, Germany.

the branches
from which hammock hangs
the dog’s spot

* * *

in the shade
of flowering cherry trees
a dog lifts its leg

Maley and his friends laughed all evening.

season of barbies,
meat-flavoured smoke on night air,
cackles of laughter…

John Hawkhead stripped naked before bed in Bradford on Avon, U.K.

lingering heat
our clothes on a trail
to the bedroom

Bedi watched her neighbors turn out the lights.

summer sunset--
window by window
the night descends

Pamela A. Babusci’s inkbrush spread this line across the night sky in Rochester, New York: shooting stars a lone cicada silent

Marcellin Dallaire-Beaumont turned his bedroom lights back on in Brussels, Belgium.

3:00 a.m
the obscene meows
of cats in heat

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

The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear on Sept. 6 and 20. Readers are invited to compose haiku related to dragonfly eyes or comet tails. Mail your 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).