2022 Drevniok Award—Haiku Canada

     Michael Dylan Welch, judge

First Place

suspecting mine

is the placebo . . .

January moon

     paul m.

     Inlet Beach, Florida

Where does this poem take you? The moon suggests a variety of cycles, and for those of us in the northern hemisphere, January sets us in the middle of winter in the cycle of seasons. What does this mean in the context of a medical trial? And why is the person in the poem taking part in such a trial? The poem immediately raises these questions, and its openness to possible answers plays a significant part in engaging us as readers. Perhaps there’s a disappointment here, in a wish for true healing from an experimental drug yet fear in the suspicion that such healing won’t be coming if all we’re receiving is a placebo. The moon suggests light, and possibly hope, but January may suggest the darkness of despair, and this echoes the uncertainty of whether one is receiving a possibly life-saving drug . . . or maybe just a placebo. Perhaps just a few of us have taken part in clinical trials, but we can still empathize with this poem, because, for both writers and readers, every good haiku is a poem of empathy.

Second Place

hometown

I hear the river

call my name

     Jacquie Pearce

     Vancouver, British Columbia

This poem brings to mind a personal interpretation through Margaret Craven’s seminal novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, set in British Columbia. In the Kwakiutl First Nations tradition, the owl’s sound was a harbinger of death. Here, though, we have a river rather than an owl. And in contrast to the owl, the river is perhaps a harbinger of life rather than death. The setting of the hometown suggests that the person in the poem is visiting after having been away, surely because that hometown’s river had been calling the person’s name, drawing them home. Even when home, one can long for home, just as Bashō longed for Kyoto even when in Kyoto.

Third Place

home from hospice—

your empty cup

in the sink

     Karin Hedetniemi

     Victoria, British Columbia

We each bring our own experiences to haiku, and for me this poem reminded me of my dad and the two months he spent in hospice before he died. I remember the phone call from my mother to say he had passed away, and although my dad had been away from home, I imagined my mother alone in the house they shared for so many years, knowing that her husband, my father, would never return. His empty cup wouldn’t have been in the sink, but as she walked around the house the evening of his death, she would have seen many other reminders of his presence. At first we might read “home from hospice” in a positive way, that the dying person has recovered and returned home, but this momentary possibility receives a twist of reality when we see that it’s someone else who has returned home without a loved one, where that empty cup symbolizes how empty the person must feel in their heart.

Honourable Mentions (in no particular order)

January—

I borrow a book

of spring poems

     Ana Drobot

     Bucharest, Romania

Such optimism in the face of winter doldrums! A pleasing detail in this poem is the fact that the book is borrowed, which underscores connection, itself an optimistic choice. Spring has come early in this poem.

spring moon—

on her thumbs, the dents

of knitting needles

     Indra Neil Mekala

     Rajamahendravaram, India

At night, when the moon shines through undrawn curtains, we see those momentarily dented thumbs, a sign of passionate devotion to one’s craft. We also feel a sense of relationship between the observer and the woman who is so fond of knitting that she keeps at it late into the evening.

a pine

among oaks

the family we choose

     Jennifer Hambrick

     Columbus, Ohio

The image of the trees represents the person and their relationship to their family. Surely the person is a pine rather than an oak, and we can wonder what that means. Does the pine “choose” its oak family? Surely that’s not possible, but the poet is pining for a family that it wishes it could choose, or recognizes that the family they have is probably not what they would choose if they could.

long walk with a friend

picking stories

from blackberry bushes

     Karin Hedetniemi

     Victoria, British Columbia

It is a pleasure to see the picture here, and to feel the shared joy of picking blackberries together. But the extra joy amid the task is the stories these friends share, perhaps stories they’ve told each other before, or with new stories added in, all of them savoured.

Coordinator’s Comments

This year we had submissions from 246 poets with 718 haiku entered. Poems came from 35 countries, led by 85 from Canada, 42 from the United States, followed by India, Croatia, Romania, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Submissions came from Europe, Africa, India, and Asia. Countries included Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Ghana, Mongolia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Pakistan, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Indonesia, Philippines, Russia, France, Italy, Poland, and New Zealand. I’d like to thank Michael Dylan Welch for accepting the position to judge.

—Pearl Pirie