Landfill Overflow
By Theresa A. Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA
landfill overflow . . .
a praying mantis
bows its head
A version of this haiku was originally published in The Weekly Avocet, #508, August 28, 2022
Manatee
By Theresa A. Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA
crescent moon –
a scarred manatee
nurses her calf
First published in Every Chicken, Cow, Fish and Frog: Animal Rights Haiku, Robert Epstein and Miriam Wald, editors (Kindle edition), 2017
Hunter Moon
By R. Suresh babu
Chikmagalur, Karnataka, India
hunter moon
a rhino
without his horn
From a Sphere
By Diana Webb
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK
Sylvie is doing her English homework. She skims through ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by the poet John Keats and reads the final line aloud, ” ‘ Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?’ ” She reads it again and again. She loves the poet’s voice and writes a haiku:
echoes
just echoes
notes from a dream
Her mother tells her the writer from the Romantic movement stayed for a few days near their home, just over a hundred years ago. While there, he wrote in a letter that he could take part in the existence of a bird and asserted, ‘nothing startles me beyond the Moment’.
“I’ll never hear that bird for a moment “says her fourteen-year-old daughter. “Our teacher says it may soon be extinct. So perhaps the poet was psychic when he wrote those lines and especially this one, ‘No hungry generations tread thee down'”
She takes a deep breath and writes another haiku.
marching for greed
in dust underfoot
music of stardust
T Minus 10
By Richard Grahn
Evanston, Illinois, USA
Spaceman, always looking up, a compass with no needle, lost it shooting up.
Always shy a half-a-moon, he’s off to Heaven to file a complaint—
too many burned-out stars, more every day;
got to get to Heaven . . . make a few changes.
soup kitchen steps
for a pillow
his last night on Earth
~
Failed Haiku Issue 86
When you take sides
By Tazeen Fatma
Karnataka, India
A woman sits on rubble, her crimson eyes staring into yours. No one is left to grieve in another neighborhood. You have unknowingly cracked a few knuckles, picked up a dagger, and destroyed lives counting tens, hundreds, and thousands…
In trying to teach them a lesson, you’ve instilled fear and thereby infused terror in someone, somewhere. Politically, you struggle to define it in a way such that your bloodied hands are stain-free. The sun sets yet again but the night sky lights up every now and then. Many have lost their tomorrow, others wake up to a bleak one. The air still smells red.
tattered tatreez—
how beautiful it once was
Tipping Point
By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA
diving
into the cold depths
of fear . . .
until I remember
each wave is made of water
Gaia burning—
and yet
one dewdrop
magnifies the glory
of a beetle’s burnished wing
my bequest
to the seventh generation—
memories
of the deep green eden
your ancestors once knew
one by one
I drop these words
into a well—
bottomless,
brimming with stars
~Ribbons 17:3, Fall 2021
Manifesto
By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA
jack
in his woodland pulpit
preaches . . .
the right of the rain
to nourish the oak
the right of the leaf
to capture the light,
to grow
a forest hostelry
for a myriad of lives
the right
of the tree frog
to cling to the tree,
singing harmonies
of moon and shadow
the right of the owl
to hunt the mouse,
the right
of the mouse to hide . . .
the rhythm of their hearts
the right
of a woman to kneel
by the creek
on its way to the sea,
grieving this bloodroot world
~Drifting Sands Haibun 17, September 2022
Gaia
by Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA
a boulder lies
where the glacier left it—
clear as crystal
the old crone’s memory
of fire and of ice
granite
under a thin pelt
of grass . . .
climbing the hill
her bones grow weary
paper birches
bending to sweep
the earth
she brushes a leaf
from her hem
a cedar
at the top of the knoll
riven long ago
by lightning . . .
the rain in her hair
empathy
carved deep in the bark
of a sapling . . .
gnarled fingers trace
the lines of her scars
~red lights 18:2, June 2022
Tsunami
By Padma Rajeswari
Mumbai, India
hearing the roar
in dreams
Tsunami survivor
Memoji
By Padma Rajeswari
Mumbai, India
a memoji call with dad hiding the bruises
Haiga Challenge 1 – Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta (Artwork)
Anju Kishore (Poem)
Anju’s Comments: To me, Sankara’s haiga feels like a song, perfectly balancing light and dark, object, text, and space. The moon is not there, but is there in the bowl. The beggar is not there, but is there in the stick. Want is in the darkness, and hope is in the light. There is a dream softly taking wing. And we see the mother and the child.
The Haiga Challenge is just that. It challenges artists to create imagery relevant to a haikai poem supplied by one of The Abstractaphy Initiative’s contributing poets. In this, the inaugural issue of the challenge, Anju Kishore supplied the poem and selected two of the images she felt best captured the essence of her poem. She also invited the editor to pick one poem as an editor’s choice. You can see all the selected poems and commentary here: Haiga Challenge 1 Results
Haiga Challenge 1 – Marilyn Ashbaugh
Marilyn Ashbaugh (Artwork)
Anju Kishore (poem)
Editor’s Comments: This haiga spoke to me in that the discarded eggshell not only conjures the image of a half-moon but it also speaks to the uncertainty of day-to-day existence for those living in poverty. Eggs go good with pancakes but like the story of the beggar, this one is hollow and lacking in sustenance. The lines between the real and the unreal are blurred by the story. The child goes hungry, but Mother feeds its imagination.
The Haiga Challenge is just that. It challenges artists to create imagery relevant to a haikai poem supplied by one of The Abstractaphy Initiative’s contributing poets. In this, the inaugural issue of the challenge, Anju Kishore supplied the poem and selected two of the images she felt best captured the essence of her poem. She also invited the editor to pick one poem as an editor’s choice. You can see all the selected poems and commentary here: Haiga Challenge 1 Results
Haiga Challenge 1 – Reid Hepworth
Reid Hepworth (Artwork)
Anju Kishore (Poem)
Anju’s Comments: Reid’s haiga makes me think of drooping eyelids, heavy with sleep. Or hunger. Or fatigue. Or all of the above. Whose eyes are they? The mother’s, the child’s or both? Or is this a view of the moon from those eyelids, with the mother’s voice blurring the line between reality and imagination? This minimalist abstract effortlessly sets the wheels in my head turning.
The Haiga Challenge is just that. It challenges artists to create imagery relevant to a haikai poem supplied by one of The Abstractaphy Initiative’s contributing poets. In this, the inaugural issue of the challenge, Anju Kishore supplied the poem and selected two of the images she felt best captured the essence of her poem. She also invited the editor to pick one poem as an editor’s choice. You can see all the selected poems and commentary here: Haiga Challenge 1 Results
Butterfly Effect
By Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Hyderabad, India
How big does humanity
need the inciting incident to be
to act
like we are all in this
together no matter
how many times
we redraw the world map?
Finding Good Soil
By Tish Davis
Concord Township, Ohio, USA
A few rose petals have fallen away from the vase that rests on the patient’s night table. I add water to rejuvenate the stems, but it’s hopeless. The flowers are dead.
The elderly woman tells me that she enjoyed watching the flowers change. She always grew roses in her garden. She drifts into detail—of pouring boiling water over the soil to sterilize it, of covering flats with a screen to protect the grains from mice and ants. Sometimes, the containers would spend a second winter outside to give the slower seeds another chance to germinate.
At the beginning of autumn, she’d return each tool to its proper hook in the potting shed then relax on the porch swing with her husband. By now she is unable to stay awake. The light changes. As she naps, I notice that the roses donated by our church have dried perfectly.
bells
beyond the garden
the garden beyond
first published in Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose 2 (December 2009)
Blue Butterfly
By Kelly Sargent
Williston, Vermont, USA
my granddaughter learns
the word extinct —
blue butterfly
Learn about the Xerces blue butterfly on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerces_blue
Brother of the Sea
By Tish Davis
Concord Township, Ohio, USA
Lake Erie—blue water and sky become one. I sit in the sand not far
from the place along the channel where my father and I used to fish.
The beach is smaller now, cluttered with garbage cans and signs.
The driftwood too, scattered along the edge, entangled with leaves and
plastic bottles.
The gulls return again and again to the edge of the pier as they did
when we cast our lines. My father would tell the same story every time
I was bored. The Iroquois, a confederation of five nations — Seneca,
Cayuga, Onodaga, Oneida, Mohawk—defeat the Eries . . .
I remember our bobbers rocking back and forth in these waters—
the only legacy that bears their name.
receding tide
another feather
stranded
first published in Ink, Sweat, & Tears, May 14, 2008
Black Gold
Stephanie Zepherelli
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
black gold
pelicans fight
a slow death
Beached Turtle
Stephanie Zepherelli
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
beached turtle
its plastic necklace
too tight