Zoom Reunion

Here’s the last poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter Z:

Zoom reunion—

the deep tree shade

we shared in college

The coronavirus and pandemic that bullied its way into 2020 brought us all massive change. I itemize many of the ways my life was affected in “An Abundance of Caution,” with the same lockdown restrictions and cancellations happening to everyone I knew, around the world. What a time it was, and we are still living with many aftereffects. One positive change, though, was Zoom software on our computers. In a hurry, the easiest way to continue having meetings, for many people, was through Zoom calls online. Other software like this had been around for years, but the lockdown accelerated everyone’s need and motivation to learn this new kind of social interaction. It’s a cliché to say that Zoom was the silver lining of the pandemic, but it really was.

I wrote this poem on 3 July 2020, locked down at home in Sammamish, Washington. This was a “challenge kigo” poem. That’s a seasonal prompt that appears in each issue of Geppo, the journal of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society based in San Jose, California. The prompt was “deep tree shade,” and this poem appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Geppo. In the flurry of Zoom meetings at that time, many of us felt inspired to connect with people across the country or across the world who we wouldn’t otherwise have chatted with in years. And Zoom made it easy to see people that we might only have heard on the phone previously. The connection between the prompt and Zoom brought me to reunions, or reconnecting with old friends from college, hence this poem. It’s nostalgic, obviously, and I picture sitting under a large tree on campus with friends, enjoying pleasant weather and pleasant company. And now, on Zoom, we’re remembering that earlier moment, or at least I am. But who knew back in college what shadows loomed for us all in 2020?

The haiku and senryu I keep track of on index cards are sort of like children. While I love my children equally and unconditionally, that’s not true of all my poems—all 4,500 or so I reviewed for this index card project (all published by a cutoff date of about September of 2024, except for the letter X). There’s a mix of stronger and weaker poems, of course, and the earlier poems show less awareness of targets and strategies that I’m more aware of now. Indeed, it’s been informative to revisit my older writing, and to gain more sympathy for the problems I might try to address in haiku workshops I give today. I’ve selected the poems here that tend to rise above others (certainly above a few that make me cringe, or that were written for certain topical occasions), yet have also tried to show a range of styles and subject matter. But I’ve omitted nearly all my best poems, not just weaker ones. My goal has been to draw out unsung heroes, so to speak, to give some of my better but still proletarian poems a new lease on life, with the majority of these selections not appearing elsewhere on my website. That’s basically true of the “Zoom reunion” poem here. It’s relatively unknown, winning no prizes and not being anthologized hither and yon. I write about it here as an example of a more “ordinary” poem.

Perhaps one’s haiku are like leaves on a tree. The tree could lose a few leaves and most folks wouldn’t notice. But to give the entire tree a rich green colour, all the leaves are vital, and “Zoom reunion” is just one example of a bit of green on my tree of haiku. I’m grateful to have discovered haiku. 

—31 May 2025 (previously unpublished)