From Baseball Haiku

Michael Dylan Welch was born on May 20, 1962, in Watford, England, where cricket, rather than baseball, is the pastime. As a child in England, he played “rounders,” a sport vaguely like baseball. It wasn’t until he was a teenager, living in Canada, that he began to play baseball. Around the same time he learned about haiku in English class. He writes that he never excelled at any particular position in baseball, but does remember once being knocked out by a girl who hit a ball straight between his eyes when he was pitching in a pick-up game.

In addition to writing and publishing haiku and other literary works, Welch has been an officer of the Haiku Society of America, founded the Tanka Society of America (and served as its president for five years), cofounded the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento, and cofounded the Haiku North America conferences, which began in 1991 and continue to take place every other year. He currently works as an editor for the Microsoft Web site. He also edits and publishes Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem and heads Press Here, a publisher of haiku and tanka books. After sixteen years in California, he moved in 2003 to Sammamish, Washington, near Seattle, where he enjoys watching Seattle Mariners baseball games. He and his wife, Hiromi, have a son, Thomas Taiyo Welch, born in October 2003.

base hit—

the outfielder’s

four shadows

first drops of rain—

    puffs of dust

rise from the infield