© 2012 Mu. All Rights Reserved.
Mu II
Like the mayfly, Mu, in its brief life, has already undergone many changes. We are grateful for these changes as we think they’ve made Mu weathered to the very passing and becoming that the seasons themselves are subject to. We think what better way to represent an art of the seasons than for the symbol itself to undergo its own life cycles. For this spring, this opening of leaf-cluttered doors, this reminder of life by bulb and bloom, this wild thumping from a growing world, Mu introduces a new editor: Danielle Buchanan. Danielle is Mu; she not only believes in haiku, she even sneezes haiku, and that’s why we have her on board. Please feel free to visit her on the ABOUT US page.
We’re pleased to present Issue II with its newcomers, its returnees and its devotees. We cannot thank our readers and writers enough for making Mu a part of the haiku community, and like a haikuist’s loyalty to the natural moment, we are just as at-one with the modern era of haiku. As one cannot contain the ineluctable expressions, we are hoping to expand Mu’s aim in the near future. What this entails we have yet to specifically discover but we do know that our love for haiku, like a vagabond heart in the cosmos, is without bounds. Therefore, as a part of our lengthy travel, we are naming what will be our beginning seven steps in honor of Thom Williams with the first
Thom Williams
Memorial Contest:
the 7s
First Prize: $100
Second Prize: $50
Third Prize: $25
Please paste up to five haiku of 7 words or less
in the body of an e-mail and send it to muhaikujournal@gmail.com.
Deadline: November 30th. For further guidelines please visit the SUBMISSIONS page.
Now we’d like to introduce our exceptional haikuists of Mu II. This issue brought another rich batch of international submissions by novice and accomplished writers alike. We’ll let their work speak for itself, but we are emphatically proud of what our readers and writers have made of Mu—it’d be the dregs without them. Mu, at the end of the day, the season, the year, is not just a labor of love, it’s a provision to us that we delight in sharing; so please, have some, and feel free to take some home, too.
dry creek
you say everything
but my name
Scott Glander
Glenview, IL
We love the use of the dry creek in this haiku as it automatically puts us in a place where something very significant is missing. We are shown how, sometimes, it is an absence that comes to define something. All that’s left is the sediment mimicking the flow of water, as if in some way trying to force the illusion of something that is not there. Then there’s the conversation that says everything except what you want to hear; the idea that so much can be said between two people, yet, the one thing that defines you—your name—might never be enough. There is something to be said about the way a person you love says your name, or even a person that used to love you. This irony leaves us wanting the water, wanting to hear that one word that makes everything real.
what was here
now gone – the branch
rights itself
Julie Warther
Dover, Ohio
Like the perfect circle, and the serpent that eats for its tail, and every modern & ancient odyssey, all things are, in some ways, their own return. This haiku examines that return by shifting the position to the left rather than the leaving. It’s in what it’s left that we see the very essence of “all things passing;” and that passing is not from one thing to another, but rather from a thing that was once in another state back to itself. It could have been a crow, a pecker, a bulb, a snow that left the branch, but regardless, it was the departure of that load that let the bough become, yet again, a bough.
mourning the death
of a man I never met—
passenger pigeons
Seren Fargo
Bellingham, WA
As Robert Hass once wrote, “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking,” we look at this haiku as indicative of the universal mortal empathy. This “thinking of loss,” whether in the subconscious or the mind, is what creates that feeling of “oneness” between all individual living things. Whether it is the extinction of the passenger pigeons, or the extinction of the unknown, one relates to the sweeping notion that they are one in the same: that ephemera of life that unfolds itself to us with the brief honesty of a mayfly being taught to live by its own time.
Mu Mentions
after the divorce -
spider webs too beautiful
to sweep away
— Elizabeth Bodien
Kempton, PA
dusk in the meadow -
fireflies
and one by one the stars
— Bob Brill
Ann Arbor, MI
morning chill my blind father ahead of me
— Helen Buckingham
Bristol, UK
hint of summer -
I bite
a plum
— Oscar Decker
Philadelphia, Pa
morning stillness:
spider rethreading its web
beyond my reach
— Ernesto V. Epistola
Sarasota, Florida
cicada skin -
that dream in which
she’s still alive
— Seren Fargo
Bellingham, WA
the autumn moon
drifting downriver -
I’m still here
— Chen-ou Liu
Canada
this first season
without her voice -
we read her poems aloud
in my stone lantern
empty paper wasp cells
— Andrew Shattuck McBride
Bellingham, Washington
rain-filled river
the things
you kept from me
long day's end
the measured wingbeats
of a grey heron
— Polona Oblak
Slovenia
snow-covered road . . .
the years it takes
to come home
snowmelt
my footprints
go first
— Jennifer Gomoll Popolis
Springfield, IL
Issue II
moonflower petals
more white
in moonlight
— Jay Friedenberg
Riverdale, NY
spring twilight
plum blossoms glow before
the oncoming night
— Kate Godsey
Pacifica, CA
Evening comes -
a bat draws the night
after him.
— Dan Iulian
Romania
canyon echo -
for a moment
not alone
— Alexander B. Joy
Bedford, New Hampshire
sheening mudflats
the bird watching
stars
— B.T. Joy
UK
heavy spring mist
buds on the hawthorn -
another year gone
ahead of me
a robin searches
and so do I
— Joseph M. Kusmiss
Sanbornton, NH
forsythia-
yellow flowers divide
two neighbors
— Maria Santomauro
New York, NY
in from the woods
I offer a censorious account
my wild heart
— Patrick Sweeney
Japan
at first not seeing
the finch
the forsythia
— Julie Warther
Dover, Ohio
blue glass smoothed
by the tide -
cold hands
— Joanna M. Weston
Canada
storms passing
I could almost
let everything go
deep winter -
seeing the bridge
I used to cross
— Thom Williams
1947-2010
the time it takes
for her grave to fill
with roses
— J. Zimmerman
Cumbria, UK
Good health, peace and good writing to everyone!
— Mu
Photography Courtesy of Chih Chen
Chih Chen is an amateur photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is currently volunteering in Nepal.
leaves swept off the back porch not being who i am
— Scott Glander
Glenview, IL
virginia rail the voice of the mud itself
— Sheila Sondik
Bellingham, Washington