Adele Evershed — Touchstone Award for Individual Poems — Winner 2025
Adele Evershed is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Poems for 2025, for the poem:
an old olive tree
listed
among the dead
— Adele Evershed, Frogpond, Volume 48:2, Spring/Summer 2025.
Commentary from the Panel:
In many parts of the world, farmers rely on olive trees as a source of income. To destroy a family’s trees is to send the family into poverty. In Gaza in particular, Palestinians are not only being killed with bombs and guns but also starved to death.
Olive trees also represent Palestinians’ rooted relationship to the land and are historical evidence of their existence in a place where they are rendered nameless. The word “old” supports this sense of rootedness and provides a lovely rhythm and assonance without drawing attention to itself.
In addition to evoking the political and economic devastation of destroying ancient olive groves in Palestine, the poem also honors trees as living beings whose deaths add to the already grievous hole in our collective psyche. The word “listed” is the power word in this poem. The TV station Al Jazeera shows a list of the dead each day as a way to counter the erasure of a culture. And while a tree may not make it to an official list of casualties, a family and community can still keenly feel its loss.
The position of the word “listed” in the middle of the poem serves to unbalance the reader and brings to mind the sense of its other meaning, “tilted to one side.” In this way, the poem departs from the conventional fragment-phrase structure, to powerful effect. In this interpretation, the scene becomes visual: the destroyed tree among the human bodies on the ground. The poem’s structure and the universal understanding of the olive branch as a symbol of peace combine to achieve the sense of disorientation and hope lost in a time of war.
The poet has, with great empathy, depicted a timely topic through clear, original imagery, precise word choice, and skillful use of structure.
Touchstone winners receive a crystal award to commemorate their selection. See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.
THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.
If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.
Having been thinking about this for much of the day since commenting below in reply to Chad, I’d also add that there is a touch of irony in this verse, a quality to be valued in haikai. That the collateral damage of war should extend to the very symbol of peace and goodwill; that a harmless tree hundreds of years old should be wiped out accidentally in a single moment of savage hostility; that humankind in its aggression destroys even the fruit it cherishes.
In addition: thinking about the difference between “an” old olive tree and “the” old olive tree, the choice of “an” counts. It is as if this is just seen as a casual casualty. But we know by this word that it is just one of many.
This is a great haiku.
Lots of great comments and thank you everyone. There are some comments, however, that border on violating Rule 1 in our Code of Conduct.
To maintain safety and decorum on the THF site, we have a Code of Conduct that applies to all site users. I have pasted the rule below in case you were unaware, and for the benefit of others commenting too. Please keep this in mind for future posts. This is not the place for comments that don’t meet the standard of being respectful and kind.
Code of Conduct: (https://thehaikufoundation.org/about-thf/policies/#code-of-conduct)
1. Be Respectful and Kind
Treat all members with courtesy and consideration. Avoid personal attacks, insults, or any form of harassment or stalking, including flaming moderators.
Many thanks,
Matthew
There is nothing haiku about these. It should be renamed Western micropoems. Without metre. East is east.
Perhaps The Wasteland is more appropriate to be a standard of these
This verse was my favourite of those listed, and also appears in the Red Moon Anthology. Plain and effective both immediately and upon contemplation.
Someone archly suggested that it might also be read as an elegy for nature-based haiku. Its award shows otherwise!
Excellent poem. Congratulations Adele👏 . The commentary is equally outstanding and which enhances the reading of the poem .
This commentary makes the incredible importance of Adele’s poem even more clear and exemplifies the way that haiku/senyru as a poetic form has the power to say so much with so few words. That creative spirit is the essence of all art, and I’m thrilled that Adele was honored for it.
Too overtly political, no kigo, wonky line structure, meant to appeal however subtly to the now-fashionable sympathy for one of the three Muslim countries that border Israel and have been bent on her destruction since her founding.
The olive is mentioned in the World Kigo database as a kigo for autumn, I think. You’ll find it in the online saijiki at https://kigosai.sub.jp/001/archives/11460. It is in any case an ubiquitous keyword, replete with associations, if you take a gendai view.
I think the old olive tree, a non-combatant, symbolic of peace, fruitful, is sufficiently detached from partisan political readings. Political extrapolations may exist in the mind of the reader, influenced by contemporary hostilities and their own politics. They evidently were weighed by the panel. But reflection on the indiscriminate destruction brought about by war is an enduring, non-partisan, theme. I can imagine Marcus Aurelius writing this in his diary. And, alas, others to come in wars that haven’t been started yet.
The enduring, rather than ephemeral, nature of this haiku is to be applauded. To me, it is a unifying and not a divisive verse.
As to lineation, the three line convention is an ELH artefact. With a customary long middle part, it’s a corollary of attempting to emulate 5-7-5 Japanese speech patterns in English. Here, we have in essence a one-line ichibutsujitate, expressed as a single sentence with the last word acting as a ‘cut’ (“dead” being pretty effective as a cut), completing the verse and inviting the reader to return and contemplate it. If seen as two parts, they are asymmetric in the traditions of the genre. In practice, the linebreaks introduce pauses and slow the reader, adding weight as we read.
This is a really memorable haiku that will endure. z congratulations Adele
Wonderful. This poem resonated with me the moment i read it. The commentary, given the current global situation, is an excellent one, opening the poem up further.
Congratulations to the poet. Well deserved.