If brevity is the soul of wit, then no poetic form is wittier than haiku. (Sorry, limericks.) The traditional Japanese verse is an exercise in rhetorical economy, composed of three lines of five, seven and five syllables. Yet as the Weybridge Haiku Contest has made plain year after year, haikus can be fun, enlightening or profound, despite their concision and rigid parameters — or maybe because of them.
Last week, judges announced the winners of the eighth-annual contest founded by Weybridge poet and novelist Julia Alvarez. Seventy-four writers ranging in age from 9-year-old Ivy Ross to John Burbank, 91, submitted 288 haikus. Those 4,896 syllables amounted to a wide array of musings on the uncertain state of the world. Judges selected 40 poems representative of one of a dozen “Best of” categories, including Most Hopeful, Life in Our Time, Connections, Nature: Vermont in Winters and Getting Older.
As to why haikus draw such a response, Middlebury’s David Weinstock sums it up in his winning entry:
Sometimes tiny poems
are all we have the ears for
or stomach, or heart
Read on for a selection of other winning haikus:
About Nature:
We swish left to right
Waiting for seasons to come
We are beautiful
Ivy Ross, Cornwall
Life in Our Times:
Who has left a mark?
Deer, possum, bobcat, rabbit
Dancing on the snow
Fran Putnam, Weybridge
Connections:
In my dreams, when I’m
Close to you — unknowing one —
My whole body sings!
Gale Hurd, Weybridge
Nature: Vermont in Fall:
Plaid flannel fall day
Sunlight dapples through the leaves
I know I am home
John Vann, Weybridge
Nature: Vermont in Winter:
Do not go skating
On the driveway’s deadly ice
Step wide and waddle
Doug Wilhelm, Weybridge
Life in Our Times:
Hard enough to find
Actual intelligence
First things first I say
Andrew Fersch, Rochester
About Haikus:
Writing a haiku
Harder than most people think
Good ending brings joy
John Burbank, Bristol
This article appears in April 15 • 2026.
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