Haiku 1: Get me that moon...

Here is today's haiku:

あの月をとってくれろと泣子哉

And in romaji:

ano tsuki wo totte kurero to naku ko kana

And English: 'Get me that moon, please!' the child sobs, kana.

This is a poem by Issa, and I think it is a lovely poem about grasping. Only a foolish child would think that you can grab the moon and give it to somebody... but we are all foolish children that way, grasping at things that are impermanent. And the moon, of course, is a great example of impermanence; thanks to the motion of the planet, we see the moon coming and going, never the same two nights in a row. And of course this in turn is our delusion: it is the same moon, even if we see a different moon each night; perhaps the あの is hinting at that idea — the crying child wants that moon, as if there were more than one moon in the sky: a full moon, half moon, crescent and so on.

I've also seen this haiku in a different version with 名月を for the first line, meigetsu, "bright moon / harvest moon" instead of あの月を, "that moon." This gives the haiku a better season word, but I still link the idea of "that moon" even better.

And I've decided just to start using kana in my haiku translations: why not? It's impossible to translate, and I don't want to just leave it out.

art by Hiroaki Takahashi

My vocabulary for today:

月
つき
"moon"