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Book of the Week – The Moon Unfazed by Christopher Herold

In the Preface, Christopher writes – “What is it about the moon? Why, other than for the more obvious, concrete reasons like, say, the tide, does it play such an important part in the human saga? My guess is that, as our closest neighbor, it has also long been viewed as a sort of friend. Without the moon, we might well feel altogether too lonely on this tiny rock in the vacuum of space.”

An excerpt from the Haiku Registry – Christopher Herold is a teacher, a haiku poet, co-founder of The Heron’s Nest (a quarterly Web and annual hard-copy haiku journal), and a Zen practitioner. Cor van den Heuvel describes him as one of the pillars of the development of haiku creativity in North America. Christopher wrote his first haiku in 1968 during a practice period at Tassajara Zen Center, where he took his first steps into Buddhist lay-monkhood. Then followed a ten-year career as a drummer in blues, rock, and jazz bands (including Kingfish, the top-selling new band in the United States in 1976).

a luna moth
sails up the moonlit trail
summer wind

hot wind
coyote howls reach out
to an ochre moon

sea foam
moonlight tumbles
up the beach

garbage scow
the drawbridge slowly opens
to a moon-bright sea

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library and please share your favorite poem from the book with us.

Do you have a chapbook published in 2018 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.

Christopher Herold

This Post Has 2 Comments

  2. Enjoyed The Moon Unfazed tremendously, so many evocative of my own experiences with the moon. My favorites were the one in turning off my flashlight page, and

    desert horizon
    it all comes around
    to the rising moon
    and
    old windowpane
    ever so slowly warping
    the moon

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