Carpe Diem #1187 unmelted snow (yuki no hate / zansetsu)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

I have had a wonderful weekend. Awesome weather for the time of year (almost 20 degrees Celsius and a lot of sun) so really a nice weekend. I cherish these weekends and I hope you understand the choice I had to make earlier this year, to bring the prompts back to a lesser amount than I used to do.

This month it's classical spring here at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai. All our prompts are classical kigo (seasonwords) for spring and today I have another nice kigo I think. Even at the midst or the end of spring we can have sometimes snow, but mostly the snow has gone as spring runs to its end. Today I have "unmelted snow" for you as a prompt. I was somewhat confused as I tried to find the Japanese translation for this kigo, because there were multiple words that describe this kigo ... maybe that's what Japanese is ... a confusing language, because there so may meanings for the words or combinations of the words ... not easy to cope with for us western people. The Japanese word for "unmelted snow" can be yuki no hate or zansetsu, and there will be many more words that have the same meaning I think.

Unmelted Snow on Cherry Blossoms (Photo by @inu_tsugura )

A beautiful image that fits our prompt for today. I couldn't find a possibility to contact the owner of this photo, so I hope it's okay that I give credit to the photographer.

winter departure
the last snow covers cherry blossoms
ah! that fragility

© Chèvrefeuille

It wasn't an easy task to create this rather artificial haiku, just because of that one rule "use the 5-7-5 syllables count". All the other rules are in there I think, but I am not sure about the spiritual meaning of this scene.

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until April 16th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our next episode, burning fields, later on. For now ... just have fun and be inspired.

PS. Next Saturday at 10 PM (CET) our Summer Retreat 2017 (unconditional) love will start. 30 Days of writing haiku or tanka themed (unconditional) love.

PPS. As I proposed eralier this week I love to create an exclusive CDHK E-book with only frog haiku. I have already set a title, furu ike ya, the first line of that world famous haiku by Basho.