haikaiTALKS: a Saturday gathering! 1st November 2025. Billie Dee, Guest Poet

haikaiTALKS: The Spacious Moment: Haiku and the Art of Presence|a saturday gathering under the banyan tree

A Disclaimer

Responsibility for the originality of the haikai rests solely with the submitting poet. 

If anyone feels that it is similar to another haikai, they are encouraged to contact the relevant poet directly.

Triveni Haikai India will take any action as recommended by the submitting poet.

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Special Guest Poet: Billie Dee

host: Srinivasa Sambangi 1st November 2025

haikaiTALKS: a saturday gathering under the banyan tree

Your Guest Poet for November: Billie Dee

haikaiTALKS 

The Spacious Moment: Haiku and the Art of Presence Billie Dee

For the next five weeks, we will focus on haikai selected from the anthology Naad Anunaad: an anthology of contemporary world haiku.

(Kala Ramesh, Sanjuktaa Asopa, Shloka Shankar, eds. Pune, IN: Vishwakarma Publications,

2016, ISBN# 978-93-85665-33-2), which our Triveni editor-in-chief, Kala Ramesh has

graciously invited me to discuss.

Part 1: Thresholds of Stillness

In haikai, presence is not performance. It is not the doing but the being with—a quality of

attention that listens rather than declares. The Japanese aesthetic of ma is often described as “the space between,” but it is more than pause—it is a living silence, a vital stillness where meaning breathes.

In this first part of our series, we explore haikai that draw us to such thresholds. Here, the world is neither static nor hurried. Instead, it unfolds layer by layer, petal by petal, breath by breath.

mountain behind mountain behind mountain—

petals of a rose

— Aditya Bahl

the cricket cage door

left open starry night

— Alan Pizzarelli

Both poems gesture toward the infinite by way of the intimate. Bahl’s haikai moves from the

immense to the intricate, echoing Bashō’s layers of depth, where landscape and blossom become one continuous revelation.

Pizzarelli offers a small, almost imperceptible action—a cage door left ajar—that opens to a cosmos shimmering with possibility.

In both these poems, ma is not merely a break in sound or a pause in thought—it is the very

medium through which presence arrives.

PROMPT: Where do you find stillness today? What threshold beckons your attention,

provokes you to linger? Write a haikai that explores one quiet moment of undistracted

presence. Invite us to enter that space with you.

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“A Dictionary of Haiku Classified by Season Words with Traditional and Modern Methods,” by Jane Reichhold:

https://thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/files/original/7fb6654a1dfd1afef97369da920530f8.pdf

Indian subcontinent SAIJIKI:

https://www.trivenihaikai.in/indian-saijiki

The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words:

http://www.2hweb.net/haikai/renku/500ESWd.html

The World Kigo Database:

https://wkdkigodatabase03.blogspot.com/

The Yuki Teikei Haiku Season Word List:

https://yths.org/season-word-list/

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Thanks, Billie. Your notes, the examples you have given and your prompt are so breathtakingly stunning. Thank you so much. I hope more poets try to see 'ma' the way you have so superbly expressed.

Dear Members,

Waiting for your responses.

Please provide your feedback on others' commentary and poems as well. _()_

We are continuing haikaiTALKS in a grand manner!

Keep writing and commenting! _kala