Duck and Cover

By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan

The Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in grade school and we had drills. The same loud alarm as a fire drill, but a different experience altogether. Instead of walking single file out to the playground, joking around with your friends, we had to sit against a wall in a dark corridor hugging our knees to our hearts. Dead silence was expected. But sometimes we whispered. Kid stuff.

spring rain
children holding umbrellas
upside down

(First published in Presence, Issue #81, March 2025.)

split open

Vidya Premkumar (Haiku)
John Levy (Photo)

olive harvest –

By Vidya Premkumar
Kerala, India

olive harvest –
bucket, ladder and picnic
under the occupation

radioactive soil

By Vidya Premkumar
Kerala, India

barely open –
the sunflowers
on radioactive soil

October Showers

By: Regina (Gina) Piroska
Turners Beach, Tasmania, Australia

october showers
a blackbird tugs at the worm
stretching
we prepare to join the group 
at a yoga retreat

Published catchment edition 4 2025

Magpie

By: Regina (Gina) Piroska
Turners Beach, Tasmania, Australia

the magpie
postures on a sheep’s back
in tall wheat grass
the discarded red remains
of a rusted-out plough

Published catchment edition 4 2025

A cloud of blackbirds

By Melissa Dennison
Bradford, Yorkshire, England

I am standing with my pen poised to record but it’s so quiet and still. It’s often like this, a waiting game. The wait is becoming longer and longer. I am taking part in a citizen science project to document blackbird sightings. Climate change can seem like an abstraction or something that effects people a long way off, on the other side of the world, but it’s not, it’s right here on our doorstep. 

in the trees
only the sound
of the wind

Much-loved songbird threatened by mosquito-borne virus | BTO
Mosquito-borne killer disease threatens blackbirds – BBC News
Blackbirds in Gardens | BTO

Exponential

By Richard Grahn
Evanston, Illinois USA

My muse has seduced me again.

You’re the Writer.  You’re the only one who can write it.  It’s your responsibility to write it—your duty!

So, here I sit, fingers massaging keys that whisper letters and words—whispers spun into sentences, woven into paragraphs, loved into poems.

bearing gifts
for a barren hillside—
one sprouting seed
swaddled in sheets
of rain

Night Vision

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

clear-cut . . .
the quavering cry
of a screech owl

I am driving up Rte. 7 in rural Connecticut. A quarter-mile past my childhood home, an infamous curve threads its way between Straits Rock and the Housatonic River. Torrential rain pelts the windshield. On the dashboard, a life-sized Trump bobblehead blocks my view.

dark of the moon—
the dreamer stirs
yet cannot wake

eco-tourism

By Debbie Strange
Canada

Failed Haiku Journal of English Senryū, Volume 4, Issue 39, March 2019

derecho

By Debbie Strange
Canada

Prune Juice (cover), Issue 38, December 2022

BEACHED

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

Heat hangs, torrid, pressing upon tired shoulders.

Touched by the occasional warm starfish an ancient, patchy, bird-shit monument kneels in puddled sand beneath a sky stitched to the sea.

below blue
sails billow
over blue

Ripples circle the rock where, in the tide’s cloud-crawl, tiny crabs get on with their crabby lives and I wonder how words can convey this sense without images to the eye.

On this slow, tedious, amplified afternoon, I lean against the colossus baffled by the clamour of these idiot gulls, ignorant in the art of give and take, because it’s perfectly clear who should yield.

crushed
shell in a footprint
empty beach

First Published in Drifting Sands Haibun, January 2022
~ Adelaide B Shaw guest editor.

Dining Out . . . 

By: Anna Cates, Wilmington, Ohio
and Steve Van Allen, Cincinnati, Ohio

even on gray days
the sun fights to silver sheen
beyond cloud cover

We held the door for a lady, dragging two wheeled suitcases, balancing a shopping bag on one. Her long black coat was nice, years ago. She parked her bags inside the door and shuffled to the counter.  “I have 4 dollars,” dragging wrinkled ones from a pocket.

“Keep your money; I’ll cover it,” said the manager.

We took our order and began eating. When the manager swung by our booth, we thanked her.

“I’m from Louisiana.  I was homeless, and an addict.  I know,” she said.

The lady talked to her meal as she ate, and when she was through, wheeled all her worldly goods out the door.

first snow
disappearing with her
silent dreams

Incantations

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

forests
burning far away
I bow
to the wood thrush
singing orisons unseen

I follow a path along the brook, through mountain laurel and rhododendron. The stone hut stands half-hidden among the trees, its roof green with moss. Thick, curved walls enclose an oval of coolness in the summer heat. Elliptical windows admit a little light.  As my eyes adjust, I notice a message chalked on the sloping ceiling:

maybe 
the world isn’t dying . . . 
maybe 
she’s heavy 
with child

*Note: The second tanka is a ‘found poem.’
~From my book Earthbound: Tanka-Prose & Haibun, 2022

Just This

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

I used to think
it would last forever—
the swallows
coming home each year,
the green hills blossoming

on my path
one pure white feather
I carry with me
news of a dying planet,
a widening war

the bridge
across the creek—
I cannot see
the barred owl 
calling from the other side

a water strider
dimples the surface,
an otter 
rises and vanishes . . .
the stream flows on

spring beauties bloom
among tiny handprints
in the mud
I kneel on the bank
of the passing moment

~First published as the Afterword to A Worn Chest by Joy McCall & Tom Clausen, 2022

  Reprinted in my book The Wind Harp: Tanka Pentads, 2023