Lenard D. Moore is a former president of the Haiku Society of America (2008–09), Honorary Curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library (2020-21), executive chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society (since 1994) and founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. His oral presentation of haiku is appreciated by all who have had the pleasure of hearing him. While we can’t offer you that pleasure here, we urge you to read his guest poet offerings while imagining a golden baritone, beautifully articulated and musical.

Haiku, and the arts generally, have provided us with many occasions for gratitude over the years and we have delighted in sharing some of those moments with you here. Perhaps these reports have seemed at times like the kind of family Christmas newsletter that suggests life is nothing but success and achievement. Of course, this is not so. And we have recently encountered the kinds of challenges that occur from time to time in anyone’s life. We mention this now because we can report that such adversity has affirmed for us the grateful appreciation that we feel for all we have experienced with each other through our dim sum days.

js


Sample poems

purple lights—
shadows of the violinists
on the ceiling

Lenard D. Moore


spring rain
could you whisper
a little louder

yc


the secrets between whispering pines

tc


barriers and flowers
on the steps
to the Capitol

ht


goodnight
a train departing
imagination

js


feud’s end
a stone lets go
of its wall

ms