Painting by Mikhail Borisovich Mikhaylin

ELIZABETH SEARLE LAMB

ILLUMINATIONS: It is to capture the moment: light on a bricked-up window in Greenwich Village, faint crowing of a rooster early in the morning after a death has come, colored sails in an Amazon harbor after rain. It is to track down the elusive dream: a white raven in the desert, an abandoned water tower, the real wetness of incomprehensible tears. It is to resurrect a tiny prism of memory into a moment that lives with color, scent, sound. These are, for me, the functions of haiku, senryu, and the short lyric. Captured in the amber of words, the moment endures. —Elizabeth Searle Lamb

the wasp nest
paper-heavy in the lilac
June morning

[from HUMMINGBIRD, Vol. V, No.3 March 1995]

Editor’s Note 1: Elizabeth Searle Lamb has been a leader in the American haiku community for nearly 30 years. 1994 was her 8th year as editor of Frogpond, journal of the Haiku Society of America. Her haiku have been widely published, translated into numerous languages, and have won numerous prizes. –Phyllis Walsh, editor of HUMMINGBIRD

Editor’s Note 2: HUMMINGBIRD, Magazine of the Short Poem, edited by Phyllis Walsh, coming out of Wisconsin, remains one of the world’s finest publications dedicated to the small poem. It breathes clarity, lifts light on every humming page. –-Norbert Blei