re:Virals 559

“More difficult than making your own verses interesting is understanding those of others…” ―Shinkei (1406 –1475). Citing this, Onitsura (1661 – 1738) wrote: “…this should be a way in which a person is completely given over to training.”

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Shawn Blair. This week’s poem, chosen by Urszula Marciniak was:

   
empty crab shell—
the tide
through it
—Jacek Margolak, Poland
 The Solitary Daisy Issue 74—Sea Creature Haiku

Introducing this poem, Urszula writes:

Life flows here, with us and without us. If we leave something lasting, waves of emotion flow from our loved ones and strangers whose lives have been changed because of us, for better or for worse. They encounter a shell of memories that momentarily interrupt the course of their lives, and they flow on, leaving traces behind. The waves mingle, rushing forward, from eddy to eddy, toward an unknown future.

Host comment (Shawn):

The sea is essentially boundless and timeless. Consider Buson’s The spring sea rising / and falling, rising / and falling all day. (tr. Hass) in which the sea’s rising and falling is one with the breath of the poet, and a moment is a day long.

Crabs molt in spring or summer, leaving their shells behind. Signs of impermanence, they are nonetheless suffused with this boundless and timeless quality of the sea. “Changing, it rests” said Heraclitus, according to Plotinus.

Or the crab has died. It can be hard to know the difference. The crab shell is presented here as an object of meditative contemplation. It is empty in the natural sense—the wind, the sand, the waves pass through it. And it is empty in the most profound sense—a relic of sentience that once was, it is inseparable from awareness, memory, and the impersonal forces of the universe.

The poet has spent some time observing this crab shell, so he understands how each wave that now flows through and tumbles the shell is part of the soundless rhythm of tides, the oceans pulled here and there by the distant moon.

Jennifer Gurney:

Margolak’s haiku makes me think, ponder and visualize. I like the imagery of the sea washing through the empty shell. I can even hear the waves as the water washes up and through the shell, lying open on the beach. It’s as if I’m coming upon the shell on the beach as I stroll along, looking for shells and sea glass. The empty shell catches my attention and I stoop down to look closer. This poem draws me in, in exactly the same way.

The poem makes me wonder if the empty crab shell is a metaphor of the poet. Is it how he sees his life? Has there been a big loss in his life? Or is it simply the crab that has left its shell?

Having gone through a major life loss of my own just one year ago now, I might be reading into the poem. But that is what makes a particularly good poem, to me. One that leaves a large enough space for each of us to enter into it and nestle down, resting our mind and our heart inside of three mere lines.

If it is a metaphor for his life and a major loss, there is also hope in lines two and three. “The tide through it” could then represent life going on, healing and transformation. For when we face a major crisis or tragedy, we as humans tend to rally. We grow around the grief and become our new self. Whole again, eventually. And stronger for having faced this seemingly insurmountable life experience. We are transformed by it into our new self. Like the crab is becoming sea-worn in its new, empty form, lying on the beach to be washed clean by the tide.

Sean Murphy:

When something dies, it does not vanish. It continues to shape the world, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly and quietly. It cannot move, anymore, but the world keeps moving around its corpse, wearing away its softer parts, but leaving something durable behind, perhaps to be found, perhaps to be kept. It is not gone, not yet at least. It existed and it exists, and even the tide must bend, ever so slightly, through it.

Jonathan Epstein:

The frothy edges of an ocean wave reach shore and pass through the molted exoskeleton of a crab. The eternal and the ephemeral; movement and stillness, constancy and change. A close-up that fills the senses with all the familiar sights, sounds, textures, and smells that arise at that mysterious junction where land meets sea.

With line 1 we see the vacated shell of a crab, legs intact. Line 2 adds “the tide,” but as yet no connection to the crab. When line 3 joins the two images, they interact and come to life — a wavelet moving through an open-hinged crab shell. In my search to learn about the molting process, I saw an eerie online video of a crab molting. Its hollowed- out center was filled with light, and that is how this haiku image appears to me.

Tidewater flowing through (not over) the crab shell accentuates its emptiness. Its former resident has escaped out the back and now, in its vulnerable, soft-bodied state, is hiding from a host of predators (octopuses, seabirds, certain fish, larger crabs) until his shell hardens.

Were crabs unable to molt, they would die. By discarding their shells, growth can continue. Several times in my life I have had the thought, “I must change or die.“ The pressure of angst and fear made me feel I would burst at the seams if I didn’t change my life. In each case, rescue came via someone (deus ex machina) who suggested a way out of my overwhelm, a healer or self-help group that set me free of my shell and on a path to new growth.

While I see this haiku as a fine and memorable, even striking memento mori, the ‘’empty crab shell” as symbol is not a finality, not death as ‘the end,’ but a sign of a passage to continuing growth.

After contemplating this haiku, I feel a pull to gaze on my imagined image of this empty crab shell that is so (in my eyes) filled with light. I watch the water as it flows through the shell and back out, noting sparkles of sunlight reflected off the water and the shell, noticing the growing calm of being a witness to one of nature’s infinite mysteries.

Pamela Garry:

Physically, the tides carry the shells along the ocean floor and the shoreline. Eventually the water grinds them down into sand-like particles and recycles calcium carbonate and other vital nutrients into the marine ecosystem, neutralizing acid, building new skeletons.

Metaphorically, ‘the tide through it’ resembles the phrase ‘to tide over’. A homeless hermit crab temporarily adopts the empty crab shell to tide him over until he finds a more suitable one.

This little haiku shines a little light on how nonhuman nature reuses and recycles naturally, locally, freely, in plain sight where people can appreciate it, and potentially learn to mimic it.

Sébastien Revon:

This haiku contains no kigo, and yet the opening line is enough to establish an emotional landscape. Traditionally, a kigo helps frame the atmosphere of a poem and orient the reader emotionally. Here, “empty crab shell” performs a similar function.

Immediately, we enter the realm of mono no aware, the poignant awareness of the transience of things. If mujō is the broader recognition that all things are impermanent, the image of the empty shell allows us to feel that impermanence rather than merely understand it. We are invited into a space shaped by absence.

The first line also carries qualities often associated with sabi: solitude, weathering and the quiet passage of time. Time is revealed not through action but through what remains after action has ceased. The shell is no longer a living presence but a trace, a form emptied of what once inhabited it.

Having absorbed all of this, we are ready to receive what follows:

the tide
through it

The em-dash serves here as a visual equivalent of a kireji, creating a clear cut between the opening image and what follows. Without that pause, the reading would feel more rushed. The separation allows the reader to dwell for a moment in the shell’s emptiness before the arrival of the tide.

Notice, too, that the poet uses no verb. That omission becomes important when we reach the final line.

through it

and suddenly everything falls into place.

The tide does not move around the shell or over it, but through it. The absence of a verb allows the reader to imagine the movement freely, without being directed toward a single interpretation. The water may enter, leave, swirl or pulse with the rhythm of the sea. The shell itself remains still, merely witnessing the movement that passes through it.

We are certainly within the realm of sabi, but I do not think sabi alone accounts for the poem’s resonance.

Its deeper achievement lies in the harmony between subject and structure. The poem works beautifully because of the words the poet chooses not to use. Silence is not simply present within the poem; it is one of its active elements.

The shell is empty, and the syntax is similarly hollowed out. The missing verb creates a space through which the reader’s imagination can move, just as the tide moves through the shell itself.

In the end, the poem’s deepest silence may not be inside the crab shell, but inside the language. It is there, in that carefully preserved emptiness, that the poem continues to resonate.

Alan Summers:

Face value or more? I see the loss of home, poverty, illness, increasing global effects of avarice, and other elephants in the room.

Let’s see the verse word by word, even as a vertical representation:

empty
crab
shell
—
the
tide
through
it

The word ’empty’ in its momentary isolation is emotive, living yet left empty, bereft of aspiration, nowhere forward.

‘crab’ can also be the creature we eat, forgoing its right to existence. We ‘tin’ them to lie in shops and stores, to lie within a prison, executed as if guilty. The ‘telling’ word is ‘lie’ with its many meanings from condemned and withheld truths and to ever more eulogised untruths.

Yet possibly this crab escaped/survived humanity to live a longer life by an ocean. In the sadness there’s also hope, a brief life led as naturally as possible.

‘shell’: I default to war and other attrition, the ‘shelling’ of civilians around the world: it’s the first meaning that comes to me.

The em-dash is both grammatical device and emotion: it could be a colon/semi-colon to introduce a dramatic conclusion, further explanation at the end of a thought. Let’s return to the three horizontal lines of the original haiku:

empty crab shell—
the tide
through it

The em-dash can be a sudden interruption, and shift in tone, change of subject, a break in our thought without entirely ending the thought, it can be a bridge, or a bookend.

Is this extra-long dash needed? Written as a monostich haiku:

empty crab shell the tide through it

Many haiku can be written in 1 line, or 2 or 3 or even 4, I’ve even published multi-line and exploded haiku in the internal ‘Long Haiku Journal’ of The Pan Haiku Review’s Autumn/Winter 2025 edition (issue 6).

A haiku can be a choice of lines and delivery. Here the 3-line approach feels strongest, although the vertical treatment is a strong contender. The 3-line version wins because of that emotive yet grammatically astute em-dash, and much more than a type of mini-volta.

‘the’ is the very definite article as we shift from a crab shell to the bigger vast entity:

tide

‘…scientists have visually observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor.’ –NOAA Ocean Exploration

through

The haiku has no verb, yet has movement with ‘tide’ and ‘through’ (an engine of movement as well):

‘In grammar, “through” … relates to movement or continuation from one end, side, or time to another.’ –Grammarly

‘it’ is the shell carcass, not its historic occupant. Do we need this last word though?

empty crab shell—
the tide
through

Grammatically yes, otherwise it would need to be adapted/revised to something like this:

empty crab shell—
the tide
runs through

empty crab shell—
the tide
turns

Let’s keep that em-dash.

Is the poem metaphorical? I’d like to think it’s the life cycle unmanipulated: birth and home, eventual death, a tide constantly turning and bringing things around.

Sudha Devi Nayak:

Crabs must periodically shed their shells in a process called molting. The shell that is its home and shelter, it’s protection from the evils of the environment has to be replaced. It is the process of renewal and personal growth. Like the crab we must let go allowing the tides of the past to wash over us when we outgrow jobs, relationships, even ourselves—our mindsets that no longer fit who we are. This is a validation of ourselves.

Every change is painful, every change requires resilience, a willingness to evolve and accommodate to new surroundings and goals. Just as the crab becomes vulnerable as it changes shells, the in-between state that makes it soft and attractive to predators, we too enter a phase that could be daunting, frightening, full of self-doubt and questions.

When we make major life changes and take hard calculated decisions, we cannot cling to the comforts of the past and shrink ourselves to fit. It is right to leave behind things that no longer serve us, trusting the process to find ourselves in a better mould.

The crab is a powerful symbol of resurgence and adaptation to embrace vulnerability and move on to a different plane. “In any given moment, we have two options, to step forward to growth or step back into safety” is the famous quote of Abraham Maslow where a decision must be taken, making space for new opportunities, creating a life that aligns with a new authentic self instead of dragging the old tired self along.

You can see the ocean through a discarded crab shell. What was once a home is now a ruin with its own use and beauty ending up as stock for a dish or an artefact on the mantelpiece. The ocean rushed through the shell to eventually break it down like it happens with our own dwellings on land.

The crab shell is also a spiritual symbol of transformation and a lesson in transience of all things. As we shed our mortal coils and enter realms unknown we have that final knowledge that we have tried being ourselves. The haiku through the crab shell is a reminder that change is incessant and necessary and in change we discover ourselves.

Radhamani Sarma:

Shells play a vital roll in protecting as well as embellishing the crab. Without shells, crabs are just barren skeletons.

The tide flows through the crab, alive, full blown, watery, it floods and ebbs. Even after it loses its rich potency and buoyancy, the shell weakens and the tide flows through it. The tide is impartial. For one moment we recall the similar structure between the skeleton, the empty coconut shell, and the empty seashells on the beach: empty seashells and empty crab shells have their purport and beauty to serve.

A crab is comprised of so many intricate parts for adaptation and survival and the tides go through the aquatic animal; as the adage goes, “time and tide wait for none”. The tide dashes and goes through the “empty crab shell” deprived of a living body—that is the crux of this dexterous verse.

Crab in full blown form, being watery all through in water, with so many internal integrating parts all covered by one shell—tide enjoys in full flow. Next, in bare barren skeleton form, crab its own beauty and ease, the tide forms elegance through it.

The majestic ocean with its tides does not distinguish between aquatic live creatures or shells; all the same on sand rolling, shining lifeless for tides.

Dan Campbell:

The Tide Through My Shell: A Ghost Crab Reads a Haiku

You see three simple lines.
I see my autobiography.
“empty crab shell—”
The poem begins with what remains.
Not with me, but with the shell I once dragged across the seabed.
I remember hiding among rocks while gull shadows swept overhead. I remember the sharp panic that sent me backward into my shell whenever the water carried the scent of danger.
That shell was my refuge.
For years, I thought the shell and I were the same thing.
Then one day I left it behind.
Now when I look at it on the beach, I am reminded how easily we confuse a home with a self.
“the tide”
Then comes the tide.
When I was alive, I hardly paid attention to it.
I noticed the things it brought me—a morsel of food, a safer path across the sand, a cool current on a hot day.
The tide itself seemed ordinary.
Only now do I appreciate how patient it was.
While I scurried about worrying over predators and shelter, the tide came and went. Day after day. Moon after moon.
Long before I arrived.
Long after I departed.
“through it”
This is the line that changes everything.
The tide does not stop at the shell.
It moves through it.
I watched this happen for the first time after I was gone. A wave lifted the shell, filled it, and slipped out again through an opening where I once pressed myself tight against the wall.
The sight startled me.
When I lived there, those chambers were crowded with instinct, fear, and purpose. Now they welcomed water, sand, and light.
The shell had not become weaker.
It had become open.
I found that strangely beautiful.
You think this poem is about a crab.
Perhaps it is.
But I have watched humans walking the shoreline, carrying invisible shells of their own.
I understand.
I once clung to mine as well.
Yet the wave that passes through my shell teaches the same lesson every day.
The shell was meant to carry a life for a while.
Then to open.
So the poem does not mourn.
Neither do I.
It simply watches.
An empty crab shell.
The tide.
Through it.

Isabella Mori—they are connected:

This immediately makes me think of Issa and his juxtaposition of the small with the immense, for example

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!

This tiny crab shell, this enormous ocean—they are connected. The crab that once created this shell could not exist without the ocean, and the ocean without its myriads of creatures would be dead water. The tide flows through this tiny little house, leaving microscopic deposits in it, carrying others from it into the vast seas—an interpenetration on a scale both titanic and imperceptible. What a beautiful haiku to meditate on.

Author Jacek Margolak:

This haiku was born out of a desire for absolute reduction—stripping the image of any human sentiment or metaphors. I wanted to capture a moment of pure, physical transition where an object becomes a space. The empty crab shell is no longer a protective armor or a remnant of life; it has become a hollow conduit. By removing verbs and focusing entirely on the nouns (shell, tide), the poem freezes a mechanical, repetitive movement of nature. The tide doesn’t care about the shell; it simply moves through it, occupying the absence left by life. It is a sketch of stillness within constant motion.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. The commentary by Isabella Mori was chosen to be featured this week, but as they have not responded, I offer next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, to a maximum of 500 words (succinctness will be valued);  academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic. As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems. Please note that commentaries must be your own personal work.

Poem for commentary:

     
a second ambulance
passes, silently
in the rain
— Alan Yan
  Acorn #56, Spring 2026

Footnote:

Jacek Margolak is a poet and print technologist (polygrapher) based in Poland. In his haiku practice, he deeply values minimalism, seeking to merge traditional Japanese aesthetics with a modern, Western perspective. His work explores the intersection of raw human ritual and the objective, unblinking eye of the natural world, often utilizing strict noun-based imagery to capture the stillness of a single moment.

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

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