Oak Shadows

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter O:

oak shadows

on a windy night:

the street light bending

This is a fairly ordinary poem, given attention here because it happens to be first in my alphabetized card box of published poems that start with the letter O. It includes a colon, which these days I would probably avoid in favour of an em dash or more likely (for this poem) an ellipsis. I usually like to mark the cut or pause in each poem with punctuation, although some haiku poets just omit punctuation. The cut is still present because it’s part of the grammar, so it’s been argued that the punctuation is superfluous in most haiku. However, I usually include punctuation to overtly mark the cut to match what happens in Japanese when they include a kireji, or cutting word, which is a kind of spoken punctuation used exclusively in haiku. It’s also been described as “emotional shading,” at least in Japanese, and there’s some measure of that in various punctuation options in English, too (see my essay, “Punctuation in Haiku”).

     This poem also has “street light” as two words and I’m not sure why I didn’t present it as one word. I originally wrote the poem on 4 April 1994, but didn’t start trying to get it published until 2000. There’s usually a lag like that for most of the poems I try to publish, which is partly on purpose, to give me greater objectivity in selecting favourite or best poems after time has passed, and partly just because it takes me a while to catch up with old notebooks while trying to publish poems selected earlier (it helps that I’m prolific enough for this to happen). So, from 2000 to 2003, I tried sending the poem to Modern Haiku, Frogpond, a haiku column written by Lee Gurga for Illinois Times, The Heron’s Nest, and Snapshots. But no luck. Then I decided to send it to Geppo, where all member submissions are automatically accepted, published anonymously, and voted on by members. Author names are revealed in the next issue, where the best poems are also reprinted, sometimes with commentary from the group’s “dōjin,” or leading members (you can see a selection of such commentary under the “Geppo Commentaries” section on my Commentary page). Despite the poem being returned by five other journals, in Geppo this poem was voted as being one of the best of the issue (XXVIII:5, September–October 2003) and was published again in the following issue (XXVIII:6, November–December 2003). What I like most about this poem is the idea that the streetlight is bending when it probably isn’t. It’s the oak branches that are bending in the wind, and the light is bending with them. And this is despite the tree being a sturdy oak, so the wind must have been gusty. And I suppose, if the wind was really howling, the streetlight could have been bending too.

—24 May 2025 (previously unpublished)