The latest edition of The Heron’s Nest has been published and includes this haiku of mine:
low-flying geese sunlight on every leading edge
– Sandra Simpson, The Heron’s Nest 19.1
This was a real scene that I laboured to get right, partly in acknowledgement of all the great goose haiku that have gone before. Here is just a small sampling of the many that I like (by the way, New Zealand doesn’t have migratory geese which rather puts us behind in haiku terms). I’ve posted the first two before, back in 2014, but still love them.
stopt to allow geese crossing some idiot honks
– Janice Bostok (1942-2011)
Alan Summers has pointed out (see Comments) that my original posting using ‘stopped’ in Jan’s haiku was incorrect. In White Heron, her 2011 biography by Sharon Dean, Jan says:
“Everyone tries to correct me … I actually used the old-fashioned past participle stopt instead of stopped because to me it sounds more sudden, and I didn’t want to break the flow of the haiku for too long with an exclamation mark. Somehow that stopt allows the haiku to read shorter and quicker… In using stopt I wanted to convey to the reader that I was very definitely stopped – firmly stopped. I even had the car engine turned off.”
the sound of geese through the crosshairs
– Melissa Allen, Modern Haiku 44.1
river fog …
the sound of geese
coming in from the sea
– John Barlow, Wingbeats: British Birds in Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2008)
the first flakes of snow
drifting down the wetlands
Canada geese
– Billie Wilson, The Heron’s Nest 4.11
‘Wild Geese Returning to Katata’, one of Hiroshige’s Eight Views of Omi. Image: Wikipedia
somewhere
between bitter and sweet
migrating geese
– Michele L. Harvey, The Heron’s Nest 18.4
行雁がつくづく見るや煤畳
yuku kari ga tsuku-zuku miru ya susu tatami
the travelling geese
check it out thoroughly…
sooty mat
– Issa, written in 1807
from The Haiku of Kobayashi Issa
Translator David Lanoue offers this comment: The mat is a tatami mat made of woven straw. The fact that it is sooty implies that it belongs to “beggar” Issa.
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