skip to Main Content

Book of the Week: the road behind

dillon_road

Mike Dillon has been plying his way with haiku for three decades. This is his only full-length book from all that time, from Red Moon Press in 2003.

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

All haiku in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by Tom Clausen, and are used with permission.


childhood home: the smoothness of the half-buried rock we used for home plate
old cemetery: who'd leave daisies for a boy gone ninety years?
a warm breeze passes through the wheat: Saturday loneliness
spring afternoon: the barber spins me around toward the mirror
new calf apart from the herd: evening star
wild roses: the slow green river  flows to the sea
white-caps comb the dark: the hands of the ferryman count my coins
I walk alone: the constant lights  of a distant freighter
early sunset lights up the long road behind
the first rain drops pock the river's mouth: salmon splash
instead I came here: wind in the reeds
trillium: water shines  from deer tracks
shortest day: snow beneath the cedar where our bulbs are
foghorn night: my coins make a small pile on the mantle
February dusk: I step over the light lingering in the puddle
the last kid picked running his fastest to right field

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. ” early sunset lights up” is a fine haiku, and ” spring afternoon” & ” foghorn night” ring vividly true.

  2. This is my first reading of a lot of these haiku and they resonate with me on many levels. A very fine collection indeed and thanks for selecting it Tom, and to THF for bringing it to us.

  3. I love this book – one of my absolute favourite collections. I’m planning to re-assess it in a future edition of A Hundred Gourds. What’s so wonderful about Mike’s haiku (and other poems) is the crystal-clear precision of his language. He’s a real artist with words.

Comments are closed.

Back To Top