[The whale already]

^{a golden shovel}

^{The whale already taken got away: the moon alone
—Yosa Buson, translated by Hiroaki Sato}

What is endangered, the
rest of us ignore. The whale,
loved by children and cartoonists, already
dwindles. Bycatch has taken
them. The tiny creatures they consume haven’t got
a chance to outlast the warming. A way
to safeguard whales is to deny ourselves the
discs and car exhaust. The moon
sees us at all cost alone.

Copyright © 2022 by Kimiko Hahn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“In the past few years, I’ve increasingly turned to given forms. I am especially interested in forms that acknowledge past writers and their work, such as the cento and the golden shovel. For the latter, I wanted a relatively short poem, and realized I could try the haiku from a new book by my friend, the translator Hiroaki Sato. The Japanese poet Yosa Buson wrote the words that end each line of my poem.”
—Kimiko Hahn