I enjoy it when nature overpowers our hubristic human egos. Here's a poem about when I was 18 and our family moved back to Key Biscayne, a small island south of Miami Beach. In 1966 South Beach was just a neglected strip of sand and a parking garage. I almost died that fall day.

Hurricane

Before you had blown out
I was surfing your jigsaw waves
storm-crazed six footers
ripping sideways into the beach

Hurricane waves you carried me out
beyond my ego, my depth
I remember desperately swimming for shore
barely making it
panting
on the sands
vomiting
Hurricane, hurricane

hurricane

Hi David,

My blog is about to hit 100K readership for 2025. Whenever I do one of your Asahi Haikuist Network postings I can be sure of an almost instant upsurge in readership. The Asahi postings are in the forefront of the most popular listings on riffs & ripples!

Yours in haiku,

Chris/cricket

ASAHI HAIKUIST NETWORK/ David McMurray

October 3, 2025 at 08:00 JST

Photo/Illutration (Illustration by Mitsuaki Kojima)

haiku on the move--adult writing workshop in the park
--Barbara Anna Gaiardoni (Verona, Italy)

* * *

Balanced on the termination knot
of the cyclone fence
a plump orange robin
--Patrick Sweeney (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

* * *

ID badge
the lanyard twists
into silence
--C.X. Turner (Warwickshire, England)

* * *

a creaky fan
at peak summer
ceiling spins
--Kavita Ratna (Bangalore, India)

* * *

surprise storm
bends the hawk’s wing
broken umbrella
--Robin Rich (Gwynedd, Wales)

* * *

tail of coming typhoon
soon after the candlelight
dies
--Justice Joseph Prah (Accra, Ghana)

* * *

Typhoon
Towering
Chasing refugees
--Foteini Georgakopoulou (Athens, Greece)

* * *

mangroves clustered
bracing for the brunt of storm
raging seas; shore’s a haven
--Dennis Lagura (Yabu, Hyogo)

* * *

the night wind
cleaned the autumn sky:
pastel colours of dawn
--Mario Massimo Zontini (Parma, Italy)

* * *

drops on my beard
wiped with a dry towel
remnants of the storm
--Maciej Falinski (Zakopane, Poland)

------------------------------
FROM THE NOTEBOOK
------------------------------

clouds’re running past
running after clouds
the Storm Day
--Dorna Hainds (Lapeer, Michigan)

The haikuist ran excitedly back and forth and swirled around in circles. Dorota Kasparewicz felt the wind pick up in Szczecin, Poland. Fatma Zohra Habis saw the wind stir water in Algiers, Algeria.

twilight warmth--
a sudden breeze rocks
swollen grapes

* * *

rippling pond--
a fallen leaf drifts
into dusk

Teiichi Suzuki caught the moment when trees started to sway before a storm hit Osaka. The haikuist’s wife picked cosmos from the roadside to make a flower arrangement at home.

Timbered hill
moves at the same time
in the rain

* * *

Trembling cosmos
into an empty bottle
verandah

Anica Marcelic eyed a migratory swoop of swallows swirling in a synchronized flock overhead Zapresic, Croatia.

waiting for news--
in the corner of her eye
a flock of swallows

And just like that, Melissa Dennison felt the flutter of a butterfly’s wing in Bradford, England, on its way to create a typhoon halfway around the world in Tokyo.

circling
butterflies
eventually
go their own way

A typhoon followed right behind Jessica Allyson’s dad who flew in from Ottawa, Ontario, to visit her in Marugame, Kagawa Prefecture.

landfall
his first full day
in Japan

A magnitude 8 earthquake shook Masumi Orihara into realizing how Russian lands are interwoven with Japan’s archipelago.

epicenter Kamchatka
tsunami finds us all
around the Pacific

Giuliana Ravaglia sketched an unshaven man calming an angry lover in Bologna, Italy.

stormy sea--
the rough caress
of the cliff

Aleksandra Rybczynska was lightly tickled by eyelashes in Swiebodzin, Poland.

his last kiss
a butterfly on
her belly

Iliyana Stoyanova has “had a couple of very challenging years” relocating to the market town of Leighton Buzzard, U.K.

end of war
the weight of butterfly wings
on a sunflower

Mona Bedi picked up a passenger in Delhi, India.

summer’s end
a grasshopper knocked
on my car window

Sherri J. Moye-Dombrosky found a source of energy in Liberty, South Carolina.

fireflies in a well
chi is bright
but hidden until released

Monica Kakkar composed this poem for her grandmother, Lajja Vati Kakkar, in Delhi, India.

grandma’s gone…
dividing the darkness
her hurricane lamp

Lidia Iwanowska Szymanska was royally entertained in the garden of the Royal Lazienki Museum in Poland.

rhododendron buds
nearby a palace window
silhouettes dancing

Natalia Kuznetsova juxtaposed gloomy grays in Moscow. Urszula Marciniak lives in a parabola-shaped space in Lodz, Poland. Writing from a stoop staircase in New York, Jon-Luc Bourget described the feeling of being watched in a circular prison with cells arranged around a spiraling stone well.

looking for the sky
through my narrow window...
endless war

* * *

a cramped attic
with a vast view of
the starry summer

* * *

homeless in summer
the Sun is panopticons,
neighbors my jailers

Murasaki Sagano stopped for a moment at a pavilion with a water-filled stone basin to pour water over her hands as an act of purification to prepare for worship.

Ablution
approaching a shrine
autumn water

Marek Kozubek dropped a needle into a record groove in Bangkok, Thailand. Rich hooted to a parliament of owls in Brighton, U.K.

old longplay--
a forgotten blues
spinning black

* * *

owls huddle
clowns to the left of me
jokers to the right

Laila Brahmbhatt found shelter.

Monsoon blues
counting blessings beneath
plastic Jesus

Listening intently, Kozubek wondered how long guns would remain silent after Thai and Cambodian leaders agreed to halt deadly conflicts along their shared border. Boryana Boteva forecasts a cold winter. Jagajit Salam passed time in Imphal, India.

cease-fire--
in the sound of an explosion
a human life

* * *

the homeless wishing
this summer will never end...
a bomb survivor

* * *

summer marigold
a mother’s wait
for her soldier son

David Greenwood in St. Andrews, Scotland, and Alan Maley in Canterbury, England, respectively, questioned the aftermath of war.

we’ve lost our best but
do we owe them a cycle
of endless revenge?

* * *

he lost both his legs--
but he won lots of medals.
Did they help him walk?

Uchechukwu Onyedikam spins a story in Lagos, Nigeria.

on the lathe
facing and turning
a silent joy

Margaret Ponting weathered through drought in Labertouche, Australia. Pitt Buerken reached the end of summer in Munster, Germany.

plops of rain
on a tin roof
happy tears

* * *

the heat has an end
coolness…
the new freedom

Amir Kapetanovic sketched an asymptote at a beach on the Adriatic. Tsanka Shishkova swirled around.

an ocean wave
and the mysterious depths
meet in the shallows

* * *

a river eddy
an eddy of autumn leaves
on my way

A severe rainstorm from northwest of Kolkata, India, spun Allen David Simon around in the sea.

Kalbaisakhi whisks
fishers’ boat in Bengal Bay
a merry-go-ride

M.R. Pelletier tried brain dumping in Topeka, Kansas. Linus Blessing juxtaposed a vivid scene related to the lingering season in Berne, Switzerland.

letting go of thought
a bucket
with no bottom

* * *

scooping up a snake
a stork gulps and gulps
never-ending summer

Slawa Sibiga may have penned this scenic haiku where the Gostynia river flows into the Vistula River near Tychy, Poland. Alexander Groth noticed how gullies can quickly erode farmland in Berlin, Germany.

traces on the sand
barely visible
river mouth

* * *

harvest season
all the deep furrows
in the riverbed

Bedi felt as if she were drowning.

raging ocean
inside me
around me

Zoltan Pachnik prayed for everyone’s safety in Hungary.

dinghy on the sea
a refugee worries about
his goat back home

Mariola Grabowska spotted a rescue dog in Warsaw, Poland. A.J. Johnson tried to cool down in Stephens City, Virginia.

scorcher
a skinny dog finds shade
in a bomb crater

* * *

dog days
straining at the leash
letting it slip

The harvest moon rises Oct. 6. If autumn winds clear the clouds over Raleigh, North Carolina, Charlie Smith and his dog Wendy hope to see this year’s first supermoon appear low and large on the horizon. Wieslaw Karlinski can rest peacefully tonight in Namyslow, Poland.

silhouettes
drones finally gone
clear full moon

* * *

finally silence
on the front line
scent of linden trees

Looking toward the heavens over Nienhagen, Germany, Isabella Kramer followed this line of questioning:

is there a moon phase called lavender

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next issues of the Asahi Haikuist Network appear on Oct. 17 and 31. Readers are invited to send haiku about trees swaying in the wind or witches riding on broomsticks, on a postcard to David McMurray at the International University of Kagoshima, Sakanoue 8-34-1, Kagoshima, 891-0197, Japan, or by e-mail to mcmurray@fka.att.ne.jp.

* * *

David McMurray has been writing the Asahi Haikuist Network column since April 1995, first for the Asahi Evening News. He is on the editorial board of the Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, columnist for the Haiku International Association, and is editor of Teaching Assistance, a column in The Language Teacher of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT).

McMurray is professor of intercultural studies at The International University of Kagoshima where he lectures on international haiku. At the Graduate School he supervises students who research haiku. He is a correspondent school teacher of Haiku in English for the Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo.

McMurray judges haiku contests organized by The International University of Kagoshima, Ito En Oi Ocha, Asahi Culture Center, Matsuyama City, Polish Haiku Association, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Seinan Jo Gakuin University, and Only One Tree.

McMurray’s award-winning books include: “Teaching and Learning Haiku in English” (2022); “Only One Tree Haiku, Music & Metaphor” (2015); “Canada Project Collected Essays & Poems” Vols. 1-8 (2013); and “Haiku in English as a Japanese Language” (2003).