What this means in concrete terms is that we are capable of being good and evil, kind and cruel, wise and stupid, honest and dishonest, strong and weak, thick-skinned and shy, elated and disgruntled, diligent and lazy, extravert and introvert, tidy and disorganised, polite and rude, and so on and so forth. It is that we human beings are all capable of anything and everything overtly or potentially, or halfway in between. COVID-19 has been proving what I have long suspected, which is becoming more like conviction in these days. So, our whole being gets shaken, with a significant number of us dead.

These tiny viruses invisible to our naked eyes invade surreptitiously the fundamental system of our existence. Pestilence tends to reveal truths about humanity, good and bad. The underlying feelings of all of us about COVID-19 as expressed in haiku seem to me to be the same, which have also been depicted in various famous literary or historical writings throughout human history written by the likes of Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Boccaccio, William Ainsworth, Daniel Defoe, Alessandro Manzoni, Albert Camus etc. Our samples are small in terms of the whole population of the world but in terms of a haiku organisation they are significant. Which turns the current crisis into a golden opportunity for us to find out in the shape of haiku what different individuals have felt similarly or differently about a single same thing. Statistics may differ from country to county but what we all are faced with is essentially the same, which is again a very rare thing to happen. It seems that there has been not a single person in the whole world who has not been affected by the pandemic in one way or another, which in itself is an astonishing phenomenon. Too many of excellent works jostling for the limited best ten places in the first selection. The result was a great number of submissions pouring in to ‘flood’ the capacity of the Vanguard Haiku pages, with far For this purpose, it was decided that this theme should be suggested for this issue. It is therefore an ideal challenge and test for us to try and see if we can create such haiku as is capable, as a literary form, of dealing with this crisis and its ramifications. If reference to them becomes necessary, it has avoided explicit presentation and used instead indirect, round-about expressions or euphemism.ĬOVID-19 is an abominable, dangerous, and tragic reality. Traditional Japanese haiku has rather shied away from these negative, controversial or abunai (dangerous) topics. One concrete measure to translate this mission into practice is to make it possible for haiku to be capable of dealing with hard and difficult issues of life and the world such as war, disaster, tragedy, sex, disease, death etc. The key items of the mission of the World Haiku Club since its inception 22 years ago include increasing haiku’s literary capability by expanding its scope, coverage, and objective over and above the traditional Japanese model. From the Editor's Desk - Make my Life Glad with Nothing

Autumn haiki