I hope you enjoyed your Solstice, haijin! I know I did! Congratulations to last week’s contributors:
Haikai Challenge Participants| 1. Eugenia 2. s.s. 3. Peter 4. Jane Dougherty 5. Dave Madden | 6. Jules 7. Tessa Dean 8. Kerfe Roig 9. Revived Writer 10. Ron. Lavalette | 11. Li/Lisa 12. Xenia Tran 13. Ken Gierke / rivrvlogr 14. Linda Lee Lyberg |
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Ultreya!
Summer is officially six days old in the Northern hemisphere, but it’s almost a week past midsummer according to traditional reckoning. The weather’s warming up. The predicted thunderstorms for my corner of the East coast haven’t materialized.
All in all, not a bad time for a midsummer kigo like wild iris (ayame):
Dietes iridioides, commonly named African iris, fortnight lily, and morea iris, is a species of plant in the family Iridaceae. It has white flowers marked with yellow and violet, with six free tepals that are not joined into a tube at their bases. These flowers last only one day. The seedpods of the plant often bend the stalks down to the ground where they have a better chance of propagating a new generation of plants.
Like the mayfly, the bloom of this flower lasts but a single day. What better exemplar of transience can we ask for?
This week, write the haikai poem of your choice (haiku, senryu, haibun, tanka, haiga, renga, etc.) that alludes to the wild iris (ayame).
As always:
Here’s how the challenge works:
1. write the haikai poem of your choice.
2. post the link of your post to Mister Linky.
3. pingback by posting the link to the challenge on your site.
4. read and comment on other contributors’ posts.
Savor the wild Iris if you can, haijin!
Frank J. Tassone 
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