No more moon poems

gazing up
I swear --
no more moon poems


I wrote that poem about 13 or 14 years ago. It was a cold winter night in Richmond, Virginia; I was young and perilously unattached to anything (my brother having passed away a couple of years before and the rest of my family being 2 states away in Pennsylvania); and I was committing most of my energy to learning about the pursuits of Zen and haiku.

I've always liked how this particular haiku (or more accurately a senryu) is about the limitations of the form, the cliches we fall into when writing haiku -- but most importantly, it pokes fun at the limits of my own imagination when confronted with the physical world. Sure, poems about the moon are likely to be repetitive, cliche, trite -- and yet there the real thing is, brilliant and enthralling in the night sky. How can you not write another haiku about it?