[The whale already]
a golden shovel
The whale already taken got away: the moon alone
—Yosa Buson, translated by Hiroaki Sato
What is endangered, the
rest of us ignore. The whale,
loved by children and cartoonists, already
dwindles. Bycatch has taken
them. The tiny creatures they consume haven’t got
a chance to outlast the warming. A way
to safeguard whales is to deny ourselves the
discs and car exhaust. The moon
sees us at all cost alone.
Copyright © 2022 by Kimiko Hahn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In the past few years, I’ve increasingly turned to given forms. I am especially interested in forms that acknowledge past writers and their work, such as the cento and the golden shovel. For the latter, I wanted a relatively short poem, and realized I could try the haiku in a new book by my friend, the translator Hiroaki Sato. The Japanese poet Yosa Buson wrote the words that end each line of my poem.”
—Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York.