Book of the Week: The Tree As It Is

Bernard Lionel Einbond was a charter member of the Haiku Society of America, and won the Japan Air Lines Contest in 1989 with a poem that legitimized the English-language haiku enterprise to many in Japan and elsewhere. This 2000 volume from Red Moon Press shows where he had moved on to since then.

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.

morning sunshine-
 in her plain brown hair
 a thousand colors
in the museum,
 this three-thousand- year-old comb,
 so clearly a comb
long corridors
 of the school I attended
 still haunting my dreams
still roving
 over parched fields-
 wanderers' dreams
how noisy
 it must be up close-
 the sun
identical layout-
 the apartment downstairs
 where my best friend lived
blue water-
 each drop of it
 colorless
after the rainfall,
 following an ice-cream stick
 in the gutter stream
in the New York rian,
 the pavement darkens its grey-
 yellow taxicabs
there in the distance
 the Statue of Liberty-
 on deck my eyes moist
tossing from the deck
 crumbs to be caught
 by gulls in mid-air
as the train pulls out
 a child flattening her nose
 against the window
the old violin
 even when not being played
 a thing of beauty
Old Master portrait-
 whichever way I go
 its eyes follow me
bootprints in fresh snow-
 a young boy looking backward
 at where he has been