Best of the Haiku Challenge (April 2026)

Because spring snow can fall wet and heavy or cover the ground like a light sprinkling of sugar, its emotional range is very broad for a season word. It can be used to celebrate delicate beauty . . . or to express a sorrow that is almost too much for words. Taken together, last month’s winning and honorable mention haiku cover the full range feelings associated with this paradoxical seasonal phenomenon.

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.

Spring Season Word: Spring Snow

WINNER:

a little dollop
of shaving cream on his chin
dad shovels spring snow

— Susan Polizzotto

Through its thousand-year history, haiku has often been described as the “art of juxtaposition.” Even in the days of renga, the collaborative linked-verse form that evolved during the Heian Period (794-1185), it was understood that combining two images was the essence of the art. You couldn’t ask for anything simpler in terms of a poetic technique. And yet, it can take a lifetime to master.

In the winning poem from our April Haiku Challenge, the poet’s pairing of shaving cream with spring snow is inherently comical. Initially, that “little dollop” of white on her father’s chin is enough to draw us into the poem. Once we get there, however, the juxtaposition unfolds to reveal further layers of meaning and emotion. What comes through most is her affection for her father. All else flows through that open channel.

He must be unaware of the shaving cream. The time is morning, and the front walk and the driveway need to be shoveled before he can leave for work. If the snow was heavier than usual, it might take longer, which would explain how he missed a spot while shaving in his hurry to get to the task.

Despite that, we don’t feel any urgency or heaviness in the poem. We can see the poet smiling to herself, letting him finish before she points out the obvious, lest he leave for work that way. At the back of the poem is a feeling we often associate with spring snow—a slight relaxing of the body, even in the midst of exertion, accompanied by the optimism that arises naturally with the arrival of early spring—a lightness of heart that lives in that little missed spot of shaving cream paired with the image of snow.

When I discovered who wrote the winning poem, I reached out on a hunch to ask her for a little background. In addition to teaching haiku and Japanese calligraphy, Susan Polizzotto has translated the work of Chiyo-ni (1703-1775), a female master who is acknowledged today as one of the greatest haiku poets of Edo period Japan. Her selection of 135 of Chiyo-ni’s haiku in English (some of them translated for the first time) will be published by World Poetry in 2028.

When I asked Susan about her memories of her father shoveling spring snow, this was her reply:

I grew up in Binghamton, NY — the snow-belt. There was always plenty of shoveling to do there, including heavier, wet snowfalls in spring. Often I’d be out there with my Dad. Snow was one of the ways we bonded when I was younger . . . shoveling and skiing. He used to say, “It snows every month of the year in Binghamton except for August.” The saying became part of our family lore.

I would have been 12 or 13 at the time of the poem, which is representative, not of any specific day, but of various images of him—like watching him shave in the morning before he went to work as an electrical engineer. His father was a barber, and his first job as a boy was in my grandfather’s shop. He’s 86 now, and we are still very close.

Are these specific details contained in the poem? No. But the feeling behind them is. It lives in the mix of seasonality with human emotion that characterizes the finest haiku.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

after seventy
she begins to understand
both sides of spring snow

— Nancie Zivetz-Gertler

a stillborn baby
the quiet of the spring snow
settles in the room

— Marcia Burton

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

Spring season word: “Spring Snow”

even a sunbeam
is enough to topple it
wobbly spring snow

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “spring snow.” 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 “spring snow.”

Haiku Tip: Explore the World of a Season Word!

The temperatures wobble as winter gives way to spring, resulting in snowfalls that melt quickly—often in a single day. This period of seasonal overlap is sometimes called “false spring” because it tricks us into believing that winter is really over.

A waka by the 11th century poet Izumi Shikibu captures the spirit of this liminal “microseason” that can last anywhere from a week to a single day:

I broke off a branch
supposing that the plum tree
had come to flower,
but it was only spring snow
masquerading as blossoms.

Because it melts quickly, spring snow has come to symbolize fleeting beauty and is sometimes associated with tragedy—especially in matters of the heart. That was why Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) chose the season word yuki no haru (“spring snow”) as the title for the opening book in his Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. The novel chronicles the relationship between the teenage lovers Kiyoaki and Satako, a doomed affair that leaves one of them dead and the other so traumatized that she withdraws from the world to become a Buddhist nun.

As a meteorological phenomenon, spring snow is extremely varied. Depending on the temperature and the amount of moisture in the air, it can be heavier to lift with a shovel than the “dry” snow of January or February. Or it can feel light to the point of weightlessness, especially when it falls quickly, barely dusting the ground.

A haiku by Takahama Kyoshi (1874-1959) captures the delicate beauty of spring snow:

a little spring snow
balanced atop the ladle
floating in water

“A floating ladle is light to begin with,” wrote the Japanese literary critic Ooka Makoto. “The soft spring snow piled on top of it is lighter still. What the poem points us to is all of spring itself.”

The ladle in question is made of bamboo, consisting of a small cup attached to a long thin handle. It is atop this handle that the spring snow is balanced—as if resting on a branch.

Kyoshi was a master of the modern technique called the sketch from nature, but even his most objectively-rendered, “image only” poems have further layers of meaning. In the snow balanced atop a ladle, we can feel all the nuance and complexity of his Buddhist worldview.

As the day grows warm, the snow will lose its footing and slip into the water . . . becoming water. Which is natural, of course—although in that moment its beauty vanishes, as if it were never there. Not coincidentally, The Sea of Fertility ends on a similar note. 

In the final scene of The Decay of the Angel, Kiyoaki’s friend Honda (now an infirm 82-year-old old man) travels to the monastery where Satako serves as abbess. When Honda tells her that he has followed Kiyoaki’s soul through successive incarnations, Satako tells him that all things are fleeting and empty of self-nature . . . including Kiyoaki. 

And so, the tetralogy ends just where it began—with the acknowledgement that beauty and sadness are two aspects of a single phenomenon. A little like spring snow. Sometimes heavy, sometimes light, it melts into water all the same.

Mishima died at 45 by ritual suicide, just a few hours after writing the last scene of the book. Kyoshi lived to age 85. Which accounts for two different views on emptiness and the meaning of spring snow.