October Haiku Meeting, Pacific Asia Museum

The October meeting of the Southern California haiku group was nestled in the auditorium room of the Pacific Asia Museum while streamers of lavender and white festooned the garden courtyard and our traditional blue room meeting place was readied to welcome the October bride. Our leader had flown north to Seattle, we are looking forward to her full report on the beautiful Seabeck Haiku Conference. Eight of us carried on, with autumn kigo and mutual inspiration.


At this meeting Margaret Hehman Smith steered the group through the gracious pattern Debbie has established for us, beginning with three rounds of the table, each of us reading new haiku, or one that has recently caught our interest from our own readings, or in the haiku books brought to the meeting. We sipped green tea and shared sweets and fruit as we read and talked. Joining Peggy for this meeting were Lynn Algood, Michael Angerman. Liz Goetz, and her friend Angelica, a Japanese speaking and writing haiku poet Sandi, on her first visit to our haiku group (she found us by research on the web), Janis Albright Lukstein, and Kathabela Wilson.

We wandered into the library, museum steps, and exhibit rooms during our writing session, as well as some staying in our spacious auditorium meeting place, inside eyeing the golden paper lanterns swaying in air-conditioner wind, while outside the hot wind trembled the beautiful lavender and white lanterns of the preparing wedding. Inside and out these breezes swept thorough the haiku written during this session.

The presence of a Japanese native speaker and writer of haiku made the meeting especially interesting, she described nuances of the words, with some double meanings, and seasonal significance. One of her haiku described the precious eggplant of October, she told us in Japan, September would be eggplant harvest, expected and appreciated, while any that still ripened in October were a surprise and a gift!

Angelica, our new visitor wrote a haiku that captured the season and our hearts:

longer nights
days getting shorter
mom too

We enjoyed the haiku samples Debbie left us, her Seabeck flyer, and I read some of her poems as a tribute while she is gone and answered each of three of them in the read-around, with haikus of my own.~~posted by Kathabela