i drive a city bus in seattle. eleven years this november. before that i waited tables, and before that i was a kid in spokane who wanted to be a truck driver, so i came pretty close.

about six years ago somebody left a library book on my bus, a little collection of haiku by the old japanese poets, basho and buson and issa. i turned it in to lost and found. nobody claimed it, so after thirty days it came back to me, and i paid the library for it, and i've been writing these ever since. you have a lot of time to think at red lights. seventeen syllables is about what fits.

in japanese they count sounds, not syllables exactly, and plenty of english haiku writers don't bother with five-seven-five. i mostly do. a bus driver likes a schedule. but when a poem wants to run a little early or a little late, i let it.

i put up a new page every season, on the first day of it, and keep the last three up here. the older ones are in a shoebox in the hall closet, on the backs of trip sheets. if one of these is about you, you probably know it. hello.

— lorraine beasley