HAIKUsutradhar : 23rd August 2024

A FRIDAY FEATURE

Host: Gauri Dixit Prompter for August: Keith Evetts

OUR MISSION

1. To provide a new poetry workshop each Friday, along with a prompt.

2. To select haiku, senryu, and haiga each month for the journal, haikuKATHA. Each issue will select poems that were posted in this forum from the 3rd of the previous month to the 2nd of the current month.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

1. Post a maximum of two verses per week, from Friday to Friday, numbered 1 & 2. Post only one haiku in a day, in 24 hours.

2. Only post unpublished verses --- nothing that has appeared in peer-reviewed or edited journals, anthologies, your webpage, social media, etc.

3. Only post original verses.

4. For each poem you post, comment on one other person’s poem.

5. Give feedback only to those poets who have requested it.

6. Do not post a variety of drafts, along with a request for readers to choose which they like most. Only one poem is to appear in each original post.

7. Post each revision, if you have any, above the original. The top version will be your submission to haikuKATHA. Do not delete the original post.

8. Do not submit found poetry or split sequences.

9. Do not post photos, except for haiga.

10. haikuKATHA will only consider haiga that showcase original artwork or photos. Post details re: the source of the visual image. If you team up with an artist or photographer, make sure that it’s their original work and that they are not restricted by other publications to share it. We won't be responsible for any copyright issues.

11. Put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions.

Poems that do not follow the guidelines may be deleted.

Founder/Managing Editor of haikuKATHA Monthly Journal: Kala Ramesh

Associate Editors: Ashish Narain Firdaus Parvez Priti Aisola Sanjuktaa Asopa Shalini Pattabiraman Suraja Menon Roychowdhury Vandana Parashar Vidya Shankar

Our poets in RED MOON ANTHOLOGY 2024:

       1) Susan Burch, vegetables, Issue 19 (haibun)

       2) Lorraine Haig, Tasmania . . . Issue 17 (haibun)

       3) Lakshmi Iyer,  autumn's . . . Issue 18 (haiku)

       4) Linda Papanicoloau, stamp . . . Issue 16 (haiku)

       5) Padma Rajeswari, ancestral . . . Issue 24  (haiku)

Hearty congratulations to all our poets.

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PROMPT:

23rd August

Keith Evetts

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This week, back to nature and humankind, but with a difference. How we poets like to be sentimental and lyrical about nature, to extol it! Yet for a biologist, the realities of competition and natural selection, of the struggle for food, shelter and breeding, are different, harsher, less emotional.

mating hedgehogs

we tell our little kids

they love each other

(Cold Moon Journal 2023)

silent sky

the wedge-tailed eagle

takes its time

—Hazel Hall

As humans proliferate on Earth the realities of our own existence are also mixed, to say the least. Beneath the glinting Milky Way, broken bottles.  

plastic totem poles

line the reservation's

souvenir stand

(BHS members' anthology: "Change", 2023)

This week, write on any of these themes, with detachment. Use juxtaposed images alone, avoiding emotionally-charged words or your own personal thoughts that tell the reader what to think, please. Let the reader draw the message by meditating on the images you present.

after the oil silence

(Asahi Haikuist August 2022)

Thank you for bearing with me this month

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Looking forward to reading your haiku.

Write on! Gauri