Book of the Week: Pieces of Eight – Haiku Offerings Along the Eight-Fold Path

From the Introduction: “Pieces of Eight” are merely small tokens dropped into the offering of life, and signaling a small payment for life’s unavoidable stresses. They are not more, they are not less. They follow a circular, and repetitive, pattern. It is the Buddha’s pattern, which, if followed, will establish life patterns of patience, awareness, compassion, reality, and peace. The author, Jerry Ball states “The haiku that I am offering here are little pin pricks of reality. They are not reality, but they remind me that there is a reality to be pursued.”

Samples of his haiku include:

his chin on his fist
a boy selling newspapers
in the winter rain

a man with a mop
wiping away the spring rain
from the temple steps

summer morning
the old dog seems to know
the length of its leash

autumn wind
the rhythmic swinging
of an unlatched door

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.

Do you have a chapbook published in 2015 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by THF Digital Librarian Dan Campbell and are used with permission.