Best of the Haiku Challenge (July 2026)

Because cumulus clouds are beautiful to behold and generally indicate fair weather, their white, billowing shapes relax the mind and stimulate daydreams, inviting comparisons to animals, people, and other shapes that live in the human imagination. Each of our winning and honorable mention haiku found unexpected wonders in the cloudscape of a summer afternoon.

• Valerie Rosenfeld watches a cumulus cloud transform from a proud man “puffing out” his chest to the humbler shape of a dog.
• Marcia Burton witnesses “a brief encounter” between two sumo wrestling clouds before they fly apart. 
• Tracy Davidson discovers her deceased “mother’s profile captured” by the medium of a cumulus cloud.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the current challenge here.

Summer Season Word: Cumulus Cloud

WINNER:

puffing out its chest
then turning into a dog
a cumulus cloud

— Valerie Rosenfeld

A playful philosophical humor informs the meaning of the best haiku. Consider the famous frog poem. Before Basho, frogs were always celebrated for their singing in Japanese poetry. Basho played off that expectation in his poem about a frog landing with a “plop” in the water of an old pond.

Is this not also beautiful, Basho seems to be saying. Shouldn’t we expand the range of things we consider lovely to include an ordinary, slightly comical sound like this?

Last month’s winning haiku takes a similar approach to beauty and the overturning of expectations as a summer cloud expands, “puffing out its chest,” only to turn into a dog. The first image suggests pride, perhaps even arrogance or overconfidence. The second deflates that impression as the cloud shifts to reveal the shape of a dog rather than a man. The two are opposites in most respects and therein lies the humor.

What is the poet saying? The answer depends on how we read the poem. 

Taken at face value, the images describe a leisurely afternoon spent lying on a towel or reclining in a deck chair, leaving the mind free to roam and daydream, projecting imaginary shapes onto the clouds. However, given that those cloud-shapes originate not in the sky, but in the poet’s mind, we can read more into the poem.

One might wish to see the proud brought low, especially nowadays, though this happens less often than we would like. But a girl can always dream.

The poet’s mind creates shapes more or less randomly in the shifting outlines of the cumulus clouds against the summer sky. But even in that relaxed, daydreaming state, her mind seeks justice, equality, and a righting of the scales . . . even if she can only find those things in the sky. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

a brief encounter
between two sumo wrestlers
the cumulous clouds

— Marcia Burton

knowing she’s up there
my mother’s profile captured
in cumulus cloud

— Tracy Davidson

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You can find more on July’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

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Summer season word: “Cumulus Cloud”

a cumulus cloud
weighs over one million pounds
the sky must be strong

It occurred to me that a cloud must weigh something, even though it seemed to float weightless in the heavens. But I wasn’t prepared for the truth of it. The discovery that an average fair-weather cumulus cloud weighed 1.1 million pounds made me look at the sky in a whole new light.  —Clark Strand

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the summer season word “cumulus cloud.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “cumulus cloud.”

Haiku Tip: Learn to Write Sciku!

Because haiku is a popular artform, its poets draw on an unusually broad range of material to find topics for their poems. This was always true to some extent, even in Basho’s day. But the trend is more noticeable now than ever. As non-Japanese poets have begun to experiment with the form, haiku have been written on every conceivable subject.

One of the most exciting trends is Sciku—haiku that express the truths of science in 5-7-5. Science is a natural ally of haiku, which draws its subjects primarily from the natural world. In fact, if we look at the traditional sub-categories under which the season words of haiku are organized, we find that they mirror the major branches of science.

The “Heavens” includes meteorology and astronomy. The “Earth” addresses geography, geology, hydrology, and soil science. “Amimals” includes every aspect of zoology—from entomology to ornithology—while “Plants” address dendrology, botany, mycology, and more. Even the “Humanity” category can be regarded as anthropological or sociological in orientation, since haiku sees human beings a belonging to the natural world and, therefore, subject to its laws.

Many haiku poets have drawn inspiration from modern science, including Tokyo University President Akito Arima (1930-2020), a prize-winning theoretical physicist who was also a haiku master. In 2017, the zoologist Andrew Holmes founded The Sciku Project as an online platform for celebrating the formulation of “the latest scientific and mathematical discoveries, thoughts and ideas as scientific haiku.” Several of our Tricycle Monthly Haiku Challenge winning and honorable mention poets have had their work published there.

So don’t shy away from science or technology in your haiku. As long as your poems are written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables and include the season word for the month, there is no reason to limit your reach as a poet. The theories and discoveries of science are a source of constant wonder in the modern world and thus make good subjects for haiku.

A word about cumulus clouds: Cumulus clouds are large, white, low-lying formations with flat bottoms and clearly defined upper edges that seem to billow or curl. They form as moisture-laden air warms and rises and can appear together in “line formations” or float alone in the sky. Cumulus clouds normally produce little to no precipitation and are therefore considered a sign of fair weather. In haiku poetry, they are associated with summer, when they invite “cloud watching” and provide relief from the heat of the sun.