Poet Profile

Elizabeth Howard

Elizabeth Howard has been writing haiku since she had a brief course in Oriental poetry in college. Her poems have been published in a number of journals, the first in Haiku Quarterly, in 1990. Since then her haiku have been published in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, bottle rockets, South by Southeast, The Nor’easter, and other journals. In 1999, a selection of her poems appeared in the first volume of the Red Moon Press series, A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku.

art teacher’s hearth
a careful arrangement
of animal skulls

autumn canyon
a hawk shadow surges
down the waterfall

a break in the clouds
an iridescent dragonfly 
rises toward the light

Memorial Day
a flag-waving lad seeking 
his father’s white cross

near dawn 
a white bird rises 
out of the bayou
out of the full moon

she rows home
towing the weight of eighty years
through darkening waters

Credits: "art teacher’s hearth" - Frogpond 28:2 (2005); "a break in the clouds" - Memorial Card for Jennifer Jean Quillen (August 25, 1958 – July 2, 2010); "near dawn" - Modern Haiku 42:2 (2011); "autumn canyon" - Frogpond 26:1 (2003); Haiku Society of America Members’ Anthology (2003); The Haiku Calendar (Snapshot Press, 2004); Echoes I (Red Moon Press, 2007); "Memorial Day" - The Heron’s Nest VII:1 (2005); "she rows home" - World Haiku Review (Dec 2011).