A total of 222 haiku by 80 authors and 58 tanka by 25 authors were submitted for this selection. The submission deadline was April 15, 2023. These texts were anonymised by me before the selection process began.

Each member of the DHG has the option of naming a submission that should be published on the member's own page if the jury disregards it.

Only previously unpublished texts can be submitted (also applies to publications in blogs, forums, including the forums on HALLO HAIKU, social media and workshops, etc.).

No simultaneous submissions please!

Please Haiku / Tanka be sure collected in one operation Enter yourself in the online form on the DHG website HI HAIKU:

September Selection: Deadline July 15, 2023

Otherwise by e-mail to: wahlen@sommergras.de

The next deadline for the Haiku / Tanka selection is the July 15, 2023.

Each participant can take up to six Texts - three Haiku and three Tanka - submit.

With the submission, the author gives the consent for a possible publication in the agenda of the DHG and on http://www.zugetextet.com/ as well as for a possible presentation on the website of the Haiku International Association.

Haiku selection from HTA

The jury consisted of Ruth Karoline Mieger, Sonja Raab and Wolfgang Gründer. The members of the selection group did not submit their own texts.

All selected texts - 22 haiku by 18 authors - will be published in alphabetical order of the authors' names. A maximum of two haiku will be recorded per author.

"A haiku that particularly appeals to me" - under this motto, each jury member has the opportunity to choose up to three texts (still anonymous), present them here and comment on them. This time 3 texts were chosen.

Since the jury is to be made up of changing participants, I would like to take this opportunity to cordially invite all interested DHG members to participate as jury members in upcoming selection rounds.

Peter Rudolf

A haiku that particularly appeals to me

A bird feeder
decorates her new balcony
nobody else is coming

Eva Beilich

In the first two lines, this haiku comes across as quite inconspicuous, and after a brief first glance you might even overlook it. However, the accusation in the last line opens a whole world. If you then read it again more slowly, you will discover the word “new” in the second line. So someone got a new balcony or even moved!

My thoughts inevitably jump to a retirement home or nursing home and I see a bitter resident whose family is far too rarely seen. She watches the robins and tits as they peck at the seeds from the new bird feeder. It is questionable whether the new hustle and bustle in front of her balcony door will reach her heart. Maybe you can at least forget what happens in life for a while. Maybe the little birds with their hopping and chirping will actually bring a momentary distraction and make the resident happy. But then her thoughts will wander again, and she would wish that the funny, colourful, happy goings-on would also take place on her premises and not just at the birdhouse.

Selected and commented by Sonja Raab

Secluded Shore.
In the rotting boat
blooming grasses

Reinhard Dellbrugge

This haiku reminds me of a psychologist who once said that individuals are like islands. He assumed that every human island has its own views, illnesses, ideas, adventures, experiences and limitations. When two islands, i.e. two people, meet, they can discover common interests, share common experiences, develop ideas, and in this way two small islands would merge into one larger one. The islands then overlap in some places and grow together. There are places in every person you meet in life where your own island can dock. This offers the opportunity to find common ground, to develop further, to come up with different ideas, to create something bigger together.

When I read the first line of this haiku, my mind was far away from other people. One seeks the secluded places to be alone. You stand by the water, maybe let your thoughts drift. In the second line, a boat comes into view. There may be room for several people in a boat. But the boat is already rotting away. It doesn't wear anymore. Rotten wood, everything broken. Useless for anything. And I'm still thinking about who I'd invite into my boat on this remote shore when the third line comes along: There's grass in bloom. New life awakens. Everything has its meaning, even the rotting contributes to it, after all, so much strength is created that something blossoms from it.

Inevitably, I suddenly see a dying relationship in front of me. The partners may have on her withdrawn from shore. There are only remote shores left. The boat could symbolize what has been shared: marriage, relationship, love. Rotting is only part of a development. There is still the power that something can grow and blossom out of it. This gives hope, and perhaps the flowering grass as a symbol is exactly the interface between two islands that can now reconnect and may desperately cling to these delicate blades of grass. Now, if I were to read the haiku from the perspective of a separated couple, there would suddenly be hope in the last line.

Selected and commented by Sonja Raab

In velvety blue
she pulls her course –
Venus in the evening

Birgit Wendling

The velvety blue immediately caresses the skin in the first line and feels good. Comfortable, soft, pleasant. You swim in it, you feel safe. The blue has a calming, relaxing effect. The second line also confirms this feeling, so it's a "she" swimming in it, doing laps, dividing the blue of the water in a swimming pool? Only the third line leads from the water to the sky, connects the earth with the sky, the woman becomes Venus. A beautiful moment, this interplay of images that arise in the head. In my opinion a very successful haiku!

Selected and commented by Sonja Raab

The selection

childhood photos
of faded summers
remains a smile

Marcus Blunck

in the firelight
the dancing bride
with a serious expression

Horst Oliver Buchholz

Secluded Shore.
In the rotting boat
blooming grasses.

Reinhard Dellbrugge

found again
the old dance card
my grandma

Hildegard Dohrendorf

Spring rain
squeak happily
my shoes

Dieter Gebell

familiar voices
I close
the diary

Gabriele Hartman

pronunciation
in every word
Schweigen

Michaela Kiock

change of weather
the may rain
in her voice

Michaela Kiock

In the chapel
when spring cleaning the dust of
wipe the benches.

Moritz Wulf Lange

Autoroute du Soleil
on my playlist
the songs from back then

Eva Limbach

summer solstice
the unread books
reordered

Eva Limbach

before hip surgery
mother and i look
let's dance

Robert P Martin

gray morning
between tired faces
a children's song

Ingrid Meinerts

family celebration
she covers one more plate
perhaps …

Eleanor Nickolay

Auroras
they stop
in their quarrel

Eleanor Nickolay

back from home
smell my clothes
after childhood

Kamil Plich

the long way to the goal
a taxi driver
comments on the world situation

Wolfgang Roedig

facade smile …
on the reception desk
wilting tulips

Birgit Schaldach Helmlechner

waning moon
again it is negative
the pregnancy test

Marie Luise Schulze Frenking

his word
a stone's throw into the water
shaft Collars

Angelica Seithe

at the window
the row of cranes
folded

Friedrich winemaker

summer fashion
the smiles of the models
frozen

Friedrich winemaker

HTA tanka selection

Silvia Kempen and Martin Thomas selected 4 Tanka from 4 authors.

"A tanka that particularly appeals to me" - this time a tanka is presented and commented on.

A tanka that particularly appeals to me

Sommerabend
her head on my shoulder
wordless
we sink dreaming
in the glow of silence

Friedrich winemaker

Sometimes it's amazing what great powers of association short poems like Tanka unleash in us. In reality, I am writing these lines in my small apartment in Cologne on a rainy morning in April, but in my mind I am sitting on a bench on a promenade in a southern European city on the Mediterranean Sea on a mild evening at the end of June - at least that is the picture I got while reading of the selected tanka arises in my head. There's a gentle breeze off the water, the air smells a little salty, and there's someone important to me next to me, her head resting on my shoulder. The busy hustle and bustle of the day is over, only now and then a strolling couple passes us, accompanied by the monotonous sound of the waves pounding the shore at regular intervals. As if hypnotized, I and my companion let our gaze wander into the distance, which only here and there perceives the evening sparkle of a town nestling on the coast.

Perhaps, dear reader, you had something completely different in mind when you first read the selected tanka. Perhaps you were on a mountain in the Allgäu and watched the sun go down after a brisk hike. Perhaps you made yourself comfortable on the hammock swing in your allotment garden and ended the day comfortably with a glass of wine. The possible scenarios that can be associated with this tanka seem endless. However, they all have one thing in common: their atmosphere. This is how the poem appealed to me above all, because it manages to capture a very special mood that is associated with positive thoughts and a warm feeling in the chest. This atmosphere is not created solely by the motif of the summer evening, but in particular by linking it to other details such as sitting together without a word and daydreaming together.

In addition to the atmosphere created, in which a certain gloom and melancholy can also mix depending on how you look at it, the Tanka lives above all from its successful balance between concreteness and abstraction. So it's not just the spatial environment that remains vague, but also, for example, the relationship to the person sitting next to the lyrical I. It could be the dearly loved partner, as well as a good friend or the aging mother. The question of what exactly is being dreamed of is just as open. Is it just an aimless flow of thoughts, just imagining your own future, or are memories of the past running through your head? The selected tanka leaves out these details of the story hidden in the background in just the right amount, so that every reader should find his or her own personal approach to it. Thus it is the universality of human feeling known from the classical waka that is at work here.

Personally, I don't find it a flaw that the two images that make up the poem – spending a summer evening together and dreamily listening to the silence – are so close together. On the contrary, this closeness is a prerequisite for the poem's message, which lies in the appeal to sensual enjoyment of every moment of life, to be able to fully unfold. Moreover, this closeness seems to have been deliberately chosen with a view to the linguistic level. Thus, the solitary “wordless” in the third verse acts as a hinge both at the end of the first image (“her head on my shoulder / wordless”) and at the beginning of the second image (“wordless / we sink away dreaming”), the so fluent merge. Furthermore, this "wordless" in the last verse is skilfully taken up again by the "lighting of the silence", whereby the readership learns here that the thematic silence between the two people is not an expression of distance, but an expression of connectedness in the shared experience of a moment. This is also implicit in the head leaning against the shoulder in the second verse, which symbolizes closeness.

All in all, this tanka is a poem that captures the mood of a moment in a very successful way. A hymn to life and dreams.

Selected and commented by Martin Thomas

 The selection

an arrow of light
meets the retina
flickers
along the optic nerve
into the brain: Oh!-rion

Frank Dietrich

I was there yesterday
where we always met
the sun was shining and
I felt the wind on my skin
nothing else - I was left alone

Brigitte ten Brink

Unibrain seeks Ninebrain:
deep down to one
female octopus
I am captivated by her
the liberation artist

Dagmar Westphal

Sommerabend
her head on my shoulder
wordless
we sink dreaming
in the glow of silence

Friedrich winemaker

Special contribution by Brigitte ten Brink

Brigitte ten Brink, former member of the Board of Directors, is now writing a special article alternating with René Possél. Welcome, dear Brigitte, to this section.

Autoroute du Soleil
on my playlist
the songs from back then

Eva Limbach

This haiku is about a trip on the Autoroute du Soleil, the French A7 motorway that connects the two largest cities in France after Paris, Lyon (the third largest city) and Marseille (the country's second largest city). It's a good 300 km on the "Sun Road" through France, from the Rhone Alps to the Côte d'Azur.

Sun, in the first line, and music, in the next two, are the essential components of this haiku and give it an exhilaration in the first moment of reading. But this exhilaration is relativized by the last word of the haiku. The key term at stake here is “back then”. There aren't just any songs stored on the playlist, but the songs from "back then" when this route was covered before. So that “back then” still has meaning today, and as a reader I get the thought, what was it like back then, and I start imagining the story: You were young, the world was open, and it was Vacation time, vacation time and carefree days were imminent. And today? It's vacation time again. Even if the same path is taken as "back then", time cannot be turned back. But she can be remembered again, and also consciously. The playlist put together especially for this trip bears witness to this. Wabi sabi – i.a. the beauty of the ephemeral - is addressed here in a very special way. The ephemerality, especially of beautiful events, is the subject of this haiku. These experiences cannot be brought back into reality. However, they belong to the “only paradise from which no one can be expelled”*.

In my interpretation, this subtle melancholy is the main aspect of this haiku, along with the lightness of being on the holiday trip. Something is gone, but not forgotten, on the contrary, it is still alive, if only in memory. But this memory is not really sad, it has become part of life.

*Quote by Jean Paul: "Memory is the only paradise from which one cannot be expelled." from: Quotations and Aphorisms - Good Quotations