Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature / Week #41

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was fog with an additional photo prompt

This week there will be no commentary, sorry! Too busy with work and all. I loved how the haiku captured beautiful moments in nature and brought focus to certain aspects of how fog exists, moves and interacts. Some wonderful senryu again. Perhaps I will add short commentary to a few featured haiku on Twitter over the week as I find time. Hope you enjoy last week’s blossoms.

sunrise
the fog coalesces
into a purple heron

Alaka Y

lost
in the fog
but for my footsteps

C. X. Turner

rolling fog . . .
shadows deepen
in slow motion

Don Baird

driving slowly
with windows down
pea-soup fog

Joseph P. Wechselberger

foggy morning
the shuffling gait
of grandpa

Lorelyn Arevalo

fog map–
the shifting path
of a story

Pippa Phillips

Diwali week—
mother’s old silks
drape the dining table

Rupa Anand

winter’s sun
reluctantly rising
with a sigh

薫音 (Kaon)

opaque fog –
near becomes
far

Valentina Ranaldi-Adams

creeping fog
across the battlefield
buried memory

BA France

morning fog
the eerie stillness
of dew point

Eavonka Ettinger

harsh winters
now and then
a road loses its way

Meraki

autumn dawn
a heron fishes
the fog

Kerry J Heckman

harbor fog
i stumble
through goodbye

Luna

midnight fog…
the shadows
of skeletal trees

Nancy Brady

shrieking chimps
echo across the jungle
fog of war

morning dew . . .
fog of starlings
rolling in and out

petro c. k.

I see my breath
morning’s also
floating over the pond

Skyeku

🍃🍃🍃

Footnotes

I’ve started this journal with an idea to see amateur haiku poets like me write more nature-themed haiku, having seen all sorts of topics being written in haiku form by aspiring writers on Twitter and other places on the internet. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. But I’ve grown into a classicist when it comes to haiku as I really looked at what most of the haiku written by masters like Basho, Issa, Buson do. So I’m not too quick to warm up to contemporary haiku. It is an undeniable fact that the haiku form in English has been evolving for decades now and it will continue to. So while I keep this journal to inspire and feature nature-themed haiku, I will occasionally break from it because I see some expertly written haiku that I cannot help but appreciate what the writer has achieved and it makes me rethink the kind of haiku I want to feature here.

HSJ readers and contributors, if you like these feature posts with commentary, we would consider it a great encouragement and would love it if you shared it with others on the social profiles. On Twitter you can tag us at @HaikuSeed_, we are looking to gain audience of both writers and readers as we aim to grow.

Thank you for writing haiku for our prompts and reading the journal. We hope our journal inspires you. Keep writing!

— Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Founding Editor
@coffeeandhaiku

🍂 🌿 🍀 🍁 🍃

Copyrights Disclaimer:

All featured works are copyrighted to the respective writers. We would love it if you cite being our journal if your work is going to be published elsewhere, no obligations though.
Photos used in our journal are taken by and copyrighted to Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta unless stated otherwise.

Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / Week #40

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was candle with an additional photo prompt

A lot of senryu or senryu-like submissions for this prompt. Usually, if the verse centers around concrete elements of nature while having a light human presence in some form, the line between haiku and senryu becomes blurred. And if the verse includes no nature and on top of that includes deep thoughts or expressions that are abstract and are hard to perceive as concrete images, I see them being strongly senryu than haiku even if there are elements of nature in it. Not surprising given the prompt. Few of the common scenes, words & aspects in the haiku submitted this week include flickering candle, wind-flame & love-candle juxtapositions. I would have liked to see more nature-themed haiku for this prompt (and for all #HaikuSeed prompts, after all, this is intended to be a nature-themed journal). But the senryu that were written contain some exquisite craft and depth, so I’m not one to squander the chance to showcase how haikai poets’ minds and spirits work wonders with just a few words irrespective of what label of Japanese poetry it falls under.

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Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / Week #39

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was ivy with an additional photo prompt

There are a lot of great haiku and senryu submitted this week and it was difficult choosing which to comment on. I’m also preoccupied with other stuff related to designing the website and magazine, so this week’s commentary might not go too deep. But I hope you enjoy these brilliant haiku that beg your mind to imagine and think.

🍃

lake wind–
a wall ripples
in Chicago

Pippa Phillips

The idea of a wall rippling is too interesting to not stop and picture it. If the fragment in L1 (line 1) is not about wind in one form or another, do you see how the brilliantly written L2 might not work the same way. The idea of a wall covered in ivy or creepers rippling would be a stretch but Pippa quite cleverly and tenderly directs the reader

towards the desired interpretation of a wall rippling. From there on, it is up to the reader to interpret the phrase a wall ripples anyway they could.

Great haiku make you want to read them over and over again. Why? There is no single reason. Sometimes you do not understand what you read completely but the verse has your attention anyway. Sometimes you love the imagery and your mind can’t help but go back to the first line to relive it. And so on. But the result is that with every re-read the scene and moment the haiku captures becomes increasingly vivid and sensory. This haiku is doing that to me.

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Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / Week #37

The #HaikuSeed prompt last week was sunny with an additional photo prompt

sunny day–
the heron takes a bit
of river with him

Lafcadio

You could see water dripping down the heron as it lifts off from the water. And if you are mindful and there isn’t much noise at this moment, you might even hear the sound of water falling back into the river between the wing flaps.

Picture this with the sun behind the heron, likely at sunrise or sunset, the glare of the golden sun in the river, and then in the drops falling into it, a glint on the heron’s wet wings and legs – what an image!

Even after a bit of the river falls back, the heron’s legs and feathers would still be wet – the heron taking the river to the tree it nests in far inland. Wonderful imagery.

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Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / 21 – 27 March, 2022

Featuring haiku brought to blossom by terrific writers from #HaikuSeed prompts:
bird, porch, high tide, enter, butterfly, summer moon

heatwave—
the sunbird prefers my window
to the frangipani

– Alaka Y.
@alwrites

A wonderful haiku. After I finished reading, it felt like I’m experiencing sweltering heat myself, but without company of the sunbird that was here on my windowsill just a moment ago.

When haiku become specific about species of flora and fauna, it can be a hit or miss from the reader’s perspective.

Photo by **Erik Karits** from **Pexels**

I assume one of the reasons for a miss is not being familiar with the type of birds/flowers and their relationship to various seasons. I’m guilty of having only little knowledge about these things. Having said that, it more often than not does not matter.

As a reader, I guess our mind usually substitutes a vague alternative for that flower, this bird when we don’t know specifics about them. And it is wonderful that the haiku’s sensory effect is still experienced by the readers even after we blatantly replace the writer’s well thought-out subjects with hazy forms.

So when using such specific identification in the haiku does work, it transports the reader to a different place and they are almost convinced it is a moment they have experienced themselves. This haiku does that.

🍂 🌿 🍀 🍁 🍃

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Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / 14 – 20 March, 2022

Featuring haiku brought to blossom by terrific writers from #HaikuSeed prompts:
door frame, mango, wintry, evening walk, bloom, pattern, tranquil

I seldom dive into language-specific commentary or poetry form-specific commentary. Basically my commentary is not technical. I’m also not good at writing appreciation. I hope the amazing writers being featured do not take offense if my commentary lacks literal words of praise. When a haiku sets off a chain of imagination inside me, there is an ecstasy I experience that I’ve often been aware of when I read haiku by Basho, Issa and the like. So my commentary is usually about all these images in my head spawned by the featured haiku and this is how I show my appreciation for the writers and their amazing haiku.

hiding
in the door frame a March moon
cut in half

– Hege A. J. Lepri
@hegelincanada

Apart from the beautiful image, I feel this haiku lends to several interpretations of human scenes. A lover halfway through the door, leaving angry. Or a lover halfway through the door, taunting and playful. Of course, the cut in half is too sharp of an expression for both these interpretations, unless you subscribe to the absurd.

Why does the writer say the half moon is hiding in the door frame? Did she first search for the moon through a couple of windows in her room, couldn’t find it and she comes out of her room and there! the half moon is hiding in the front door frame.

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Last Week’s #HaikuSeed Blossoms – Feature With Commentary / 06 – 10 March, 2022

Featuring few brilliant haiku brought to blossom by terrific writers, seeded by #HaikuSeed prompts.
#HaikuSeed: weeding, roadside, crane, moss, jolly, scarf

early spring
the crane and the heron
playing statues

– @LazyBookworm

The image of a crane and heron standing still is quite trivial and the haiku wouldn’t be doing much if it was just describing it without doing something more with the juxtaposing image. I felt that early spring doesn’t give any life to the triviality of this moment even though spring itself and the birds are full of it. Instead, the writer’s creative use of playing statues brought all the life into the haiku. Not only is it an entertaining way of saying that the birds are standing still like statues, it could also mean that the crane and the heron are actively playing a game of statue. This interpretation brings back memories from childhood where we as kids shout “statue!” pointing at a person and the person has to literally freeze in place and stay still like a statue. The idea of a crane and heron playing this game is quite amusing.

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