The Olympic Games

high diver
at the platform's edge
stillness
--Bill Kenney, USA

The Olympic Games was the theme for this kukai ; for which Bill's haiku emerged as the winning haiku. Olympic Games for participants as well as supporters connotes tension. There are the final goodbyes after all the medalling, tears and disappointments quickly transitioned into the expectations of the next four years. No doubt there is tension in waiting, in training and in hoping.

Bill heightens the reader's expectations in this haiku by taking us to the top of a divers platform; our senses as readers are at peak. At the edge is where, he skillfully pulls ever fibre of nerve in us readers, to the hush; where all is left now to the cord of expertise and fate; which binds diver, sky, water, supporters in a magical few moments.

How well Bill's skilfully crafted haiku resonates all of this in choice and placement of thought, theme and presentation. Pivoting haiku and reader at Line Two's platform.

Well Done Bill

bud

first buds
the dream fading
as I tell it
--Bill Kenney, USA

I do not have a home spring experience; coming from and living in the tropics; my friends online tell me of their hankering for spring's warmth and renewing greenery during the white cold of winter 's snow blankets; and i emphatise, and my empathy is not with out substance; for i have briefly experienced winter's cold blasts while on vacation in Brooklyn New York; shortlived as my holiday stay was, it remains etched in my memory sphere.

I can very well sense the fleeting of Bill's haiku spring moment, be it the reality of a newwnes of life, in this budding phase; or the waking up out of, a spring filling dream; either way, the themes of longing and the ephemeral are solidly expressed.

Bill, hints but does not state concretely, about this phenomenon of budding; where is the reality, where is its existence, where the occurrance? Is it in a day's snapshot of retaining, or a fantasy's whirl of escaping, what we do know of this (a coming into, a coming out of?) Bill thinks surely that's enough for his haiku audience, an expression has been embossed in his existence important enough to share; Thank you Bill for your sharing; well done, in ten syllables.

“Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.” William Carlos Williams


--gillena cox
coordinator; Caribbean Kigo Kukai



the theme of the kukai was bud