Per Diem/Haiku of the Day for March 2022: Longing and Loss

Per Diem/Haiku of the Day for March 2022 features Guest Editor Tejinder Sethi collection on the theme of Longing and Loss. This is what Teji has to say by way of introduction to this theme:

It has been hard for me to fully mourn the passing of my friends and family in 2021, a year defined by loss. I believe grief, love and longing are universal expressions that connect us. I had read somewhere that poems connect us to this sense of shared fate by awakening in us both the remembrance of shared exposure and a fundamental, precise experience of empathy. They loosen us from the loneliness of separation and the erasures of generality.

The poems I have chosen for the theme ‘longing and loss’ are those that resonate with me.  The passing river, the moon, inhaling the scent of pines, train whistle, weathered bench, express a sense of longing—to be intensely absorbed in the moment and its profound feeling when deep inside you know that the moment is fleeting, and you have already started missing it.  These poems try to capture loss in all tones, in emptiness, in blooms, in deep winter, in thin skin of dusk, autumn shadows or strands of a broken web, they do it subtly and elegantly.

I hope you enjoy reading them!

season of falling leaves
wherever life
takes us

—Tejinder Sethi

See also our Haiku of the Day Archive.