For today's post I wanted to share a remarkable resource that I learned about in our SW regional Haiku Society of America meeting last weekend (more about that here): it's the WORLD KIGO DATABASE curated by Dr. Gabi Greve at the Daruma Museum in Japan.

The Kigo Database is an enormous blog site, and I have to say as a long-time user of Blogger that I was pleased to see it put to such good use! You will find season words here, discussions of their meaning, along with haiku to illustrate them.

I have not written yet here about these "season words," kigo in Japanese, that are a hallmark feature of classical haiku poetry, along with kidai, seasonal themes or topics. Lists of these words, called saijiki, have circulated in Japan for centuries to assist haiku poets in their writing, and now that haiku has become a worldwide phenomenon, it makes sense that there would be lists of season words for different countries and climates. That is what you will find at the World Kigo Database.

You can start by looking at this orientation: KIGO - use in haiku. Then you can move on to the lists season by season. For example, here are the Japanese summer words. In addition, there are also lists of season words as used by the classical Japanese haiku masters Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson.

But this is not just a Japanese project: it really is worldwide. So, you can read all about season words for North America, looking for the North America label on the blog posts. That's how I found my way to this post about the flycatcher birds of summer, and in addition to the flycatcher birds of the United States, I also read about the flycatchers of India and Japan.

Because the flycatcher is the state bird of Oklahoma (where I used to live, just north up the road from here in Texas where I live now), I found my way to the season words of Oklahoma! How cool is that? It's not complete, but there are lots of Oklahoma summer words listed there. And from a link there, I found my way to the post about the grackle as a seasonal bird. There are lots of grackles here in Austin too!

So I used the power of Google search to see what kind of grackle haiku I might find, and behold – a lovely grackle haiku with art too by yomeow:

Squeal - squawk - whoop - dee - caw!
Noisy, crazy song. Bird flock?
Only one grackle.