2025 Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems — Short List

The Haiku Foundation is pleased to announce the Short List for the 2025 Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems. These awards recognize excellence and innovation in English-language haiku and senryu published in juried public venues during each calendar year.

In this second round, the panel selected their top choices from the Long List. The resulting Short List reflects the 23 highest-scoring poems based on the panel’s collective voting. The final results will be announced on April 17, as part of The Haiku Foundation’s celebration of International Haiku Poetry Day.

Many thanks to our distinguished panel: Thomas Haynes, Annette Makino, Sarah Paris, Dan Schwerin, and Mary Stevens.

Please join us in cheering on these fine poets!

Matthew Markworth
Coordinator, Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems

undocumented
a man without
a planet

— Cynthia Anderson, Prune Juice, Issue 46, August 2025.

snowflakes
each breath of the newborn
on its ventilator

— Bisshie, Wales Haiku Journal, Spring 2025.

darkness
pressing on the house
my hands in warm dough

— Shawn Blair, Modern Haiku, Volume 56.3, Autumn 2025.

secrets she did not mean to keep the war

— Claire Vogel Camargo, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Issue 13, June 2025.

moonlight
the shimmer-sound
of an electric car

— Louise Carson, Frogpond, Volume 48:2, Spring/Summer 2025.

an old olive tree
listed
among the dead

— Adele Evershed, Frogpond, Volume 48:2, Spring/Summer 2025.

taking her history of falling leaves

— Barbara Fink, Mariposa 53, Autumn/Winter 2025.

blue eggshell
something in me
made of sky

— Edward Cody Huddleston, The Heron’s Nest, Volume XXVII, Issue 3, September 2025.

sunday dosing winds in parts per willow

— Jonathan Humphrey, Acorn 54, Spring 2025.

dusk
fine tuning the dark
around a cello

— Jonathan Humphrey, NOON: Journal of the Short Poem, Issue 27, April 2025.

low-slung sky
the rain hanging
by a hundred prayers

— Anju Kishore, The Heron’s Nest, Volume XXVII, Issue 4, December 2025.

the doctor shrugs nothing he can     for me withering wind

— Kat Lehmann, Rattle, March 26, 2025.

river cloud
the X of this body
unsolvable

— Kat Lehmann, Rattle, April 25, 2025.

as much as I want to be still these wild flowers

— Kat Lehmann, Rattle, May 27, 2025.

      big
  enough
prayer rug

— Peter Newton, Modern Haiku, Volume 56.3, Autumn 2025.

eventide—
a murmur of pigeons
folds the night

— Madhuri Pillai, Echidna Tracks, Issue 15, Winter/Spring 2025.

summer solstice
every day a little more
daughter than son

— Marjolein Rotsteeg, The Mainichi, August 21, 2025.

before autumn unpetals the last word inoperable

— Rich Schilling, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Issue 13, June 2025.

wind-bent reeds
the part of me
that won’t stop swaying

— Nalini Shetty, haikuKATHA, Issue 49, November 2025.

whitening pine
the crow shakes itself
back to black

— Laszlo Slomovits, Geppo, L:2, May 2025.

raising the host
a glimpse
of the priest’s tattoo

— Stephen Toft, Haiku in Action, August 18, 2025.

emptying the house
story by story
winter’s end

— Susan Yavaniski, Acorn 55, Fall 2025.

a prayer without translation border fence

— Nitu Yumnam, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Issue 13, June 2025.

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