2024 ukiaHaiku Festival Contest Winners

This year’s ukiaHaiku contest received 404 entries for the international division. In selecting these poems I looked for vividness of experience, originality of expression, and accessible immediacy. The best haiku also incorporated objective sensory imagery, a two-part juxtaposition, and a reliance on natural or organic form. When you read these poems, I hope you will feel what each author felt, and find pangs of recognition in your heart. Congratulations to all the winners, and to everyone else for participating.

First Place

lighthouse
every ten seconds
the kissing couple

Annette Akkerman, Netherlands

What a romantic place and time to kiss. In this delightful poem someone else notices the kissing couple, a couple that seems oblivious to the lighthouse beam and to whoever is observing them—they are so caught up in their passion. The observer is fascinated too, seeing the couple not once but several times as the lighthouse beam makes its circle.

Second Place

windy night
the sky fastened
with stars

Srini, India

No matter how windy and even threatening this windy night might be, the stars serve as an anchor, a sign of surety. I imagine a location far from a city, with no light pollution, where those stars are vivid, perhaps also seen with the sweep of the Milky Way. The stars remind us, despite turmoil, that nature and even life offers substance we can still depend on.

Third Place

your whisper
in my ear
falling snow

Jeff Hoagland, New Jersey

A traditional haiku will typically indicate a season, as this poem does. Despite the coldness of snow, there’s warmth in this whisper, captured in a romantic moment. Surely this couple is delighting in the snowfall, at least for now, delighting in their shared moment of togetherness.

Honourable Mentions (in order)

moonlight sonata
the pianist’s fingers
suspended

Robert Kania, Poland

Whether you know this Beethoven piece or not, it’s easy to imagine that moment between its gentle notes or movements where the performer’s hands pause in midair, about to play again, or perhaps held in the air when the last note is played. We too are suspended in the music’s beauty.

sun motes . . .
the calligraphy
of chickadees

Brad Bennett, Massachusetts

Perhaps these sun motes have been stirred up by the chickadees, flitting this way and that to find something to eat. The birds’ movements are not random but likened to the smooth flow of calligraphy, recognizing the beauty of movement beyond song.

spring mowing
among the clippings
a butterfly wing

David Josephsohn, North Carolina

A trace of melancholy self-reflection enters this poem. Did the act of mowing hurt the butterfly, or was it already dead? Either way, the person mowing a lawn notices what I see as the bright color of a butterfly’s wing and no doubt feels sad.

winter air
the fleeting shapes
of our breaths

Małgorzata Formanowska, Poland

Just as we see our breaths in cold air only fleetingly, the season of winter is relatively fleeting too. And even so are our lives. I see a romantic scene here, but it could be a conversation between any two people. Relationships can be all too fleeting also.

landfill
a hand of a doll
sticking out

Zelyko Funda, Croatia

Not all haiku need to be sweet or beautiful. This landfill scene reminds us of a human presence, and perhaps human responsibility, deepened in this case by the doll’s invocation of a child, which may lead us to wonder about the future of our planet and our management of its limited resources.