“Red leaves” have long been associated with the acceleration of time in haiku poetry—that noticeable quickening we feel at the end of autumn as the year begins to come to its close. The dominant feeling of haiku on this theme tends to be melancholy, but there are many flavors of that emotion, some of them lightened by humor or wordplay, others mixed with wistfulness or longing. The winning and honorable mention haiku for last month’s challenge covered the full range of those feelings.

• Valerie Rosenfeld conjures a vision of souls passing into the ancestral realm in her image of “red leaves in the wind.”
• L.A. Kimball becomes a “chaperone” to red leaves as they follow the draft of his car into a parking garage.
• Gregory Tullock marks the end of autumn and the end of a relationship in the image of leaves “letting go like us.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the current challenge here.

WINNER:

my elders slowly
becoming my ancestors—
red leaves in the wind

— Valerie Rosenfeld

Basho once remarked, “What is the use of saying everything?” As contemporary haiku master Mayuzumi Madoka explains: “It is between the lines—in the words that have been left unsaid—that the haiku communicates the poet’s deepest sentiments and thoughts. Words alone cannot describe the fullness of the human experience.”

From its earliest origins, haiku has always been a collaborative form of literature that relied upon an imaginative exchange between poet and reader. You couldn’t say everything in seventeen syllables. You weren’t even supposed to try. The poet’s job was to establish a range of possible thoughts and feelings that would allow the reader to intuit the meaning of the poem. 

“My elders are slowly becoming my ancestors,” observes the poet in last month’s winning haiku. Valerie then directs our attention to the image of “red leaves in the wind.” She holds back from asserting a relationship between the two parts of the poem. Their meaning lives “between the lines” in that unexpressed connection.

The word “slowly” suggests a passage of some years during which members of her parents’ generation have died and passed into the ancestral realm, while the image of “red leaves in the wind” establishes the setting. The time is autumn, the place outdoors on a chilly late autumn day.

The final image accelerates our experience of time, even as it establishes a parallel between the leaves and the elders, both carried off by the winds of time. Having departed from this world, the latter exist in the timeless realm of the ancestors. But the red leaves are experienced as happening now—right before her eyes.

It may take a while to get there, but most readers will eventually experience the presence of the ancestors (their own and the poet’s) in those wind-driven leaves. They may also notice a few other leaves waiting their turn, still clinging to the branch. With a little patience, they will be able to watch as these, too, release their hold to join the others in the wind.

What is the meaning of the poem? Most likely it is this: that the living and the dead are forever trading places in a dance as old as the universe itself. Naturally, the poet doesn’t say that. She merely points us in that direction through a juxtaposition of images and allows us to experience the dance for ourselves.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

as their chaperone,
I bring red leaves to visit
the parking garage

— L.A. Kimball

nothing left to say
and the red leaves were falling
letting go like us

— Gregory Tullock

♦

You can find more on October’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Fall season word: “Red Leaves”

a red maple leaf
fallen vein-side up, the wind
has told its fortune

An autumn wind filled the yard and quickly subsided. I went outside and found a red maple leaf upside down on a stone. Its veins resembled the lines of an open palm.   — Clark Strand

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the autumn season word “red leaves.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “red leaves.”

Haiku Tip: Help Build a Season Word Anthology!

Some of our Tricycle poets have wondered where I come up with the season words for each month’s haiku challenge. In Japan, poets make use of a saijiki, or “season word almanac,” that includes hundreds (or even thousands) of season words, along with famous haiku that have employed them. Part nature guide, part anthology, a saijiki is the one essential reference book for haiku poets in Japan.

Saijiki come in all sizes. Some are abbreviated, making them portable (a bit like a pocket dictionary). Others are multivolume illustrated encyclopedias that would fill up the greater part of a shelf. One of the best-known was compiled by Kenkichi Yamamoto (1907–1988), the most influential haiku critic of the 20th century. His six-volume saijiki is considered definitive for Japanese poets.

This month we are going to try our hand at one of the most classical themes of haiku: “red leaves.” Here is a modern example, written by the singular Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yukio Mishima when he was only 7 years old:

my younger brother
his tiny palms held open
like red maples leaves

You have to know that the red leaves Mishima is referring to are usually assumed to be those of a Japanese maple, which are somewhat feathery and delicate. The comparison to a young boy’s palms makes sense when we learn that Mishima’s brother was only 2 years old at the time he wrote the poem.

Here’s another example, this one by Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828):

the gong to announce
visitors at the temple
gobbles up red leaves

And another by Issa, since “red leaves” was one of his favorite season words:

at dawn a keepsake
left for me on the window
a red maple leaf

These are only a few examples, but they give you an idea of what it’s like to read through the poems listed in a saijiki for a particular season word.

This year, at last, we will begin compiling our own season word almanac for haiku in English. The project will be overseen by the editorial board of 17-Haiku in English as part of the “2025 A Year of Haiku” program and will draw from works composed by poets in the various haiku communities I oversee, including this one.

When it is finished, our Annotated Season Word Anthology will be the first volume of its kind ever produced outside of Japan. Because the season words of haiku are shared by poets across the centuries, they make it possible to share a common “nature language,” not only with our contemporaries but with our haiku ancestors and descendants as well.

A note on red leaves: From a biological point of view, the leaves of a tree change colors in the autumn when their chlorophyll breaks down to reveal the presence of yellow or orange “helper chemicals” that were present in the leaves all along. Red leaves result from a different process, as sugars called anthocyanins produce a pigment that combines with chlorophyll to produce different shades of red. Various trees other than maples produce red foliage in autumn, including dogwoods, red oaks, scarlet oaks, and sassafras. Red leaves are inherently ambiguous as a symbol because, while their colors are the most vibrant of the autumn landscape, they are followed by death and a fall.