Hesitancy
Being chased
The firefly
Hides in the moon.
~ Ryōta
When poetry is analyzed too much,
It starts to lose its meaning or its force.
A haiku clarified with heavy touch
Becomes transparent to the mind, of course,
But dies inside the heart. The soul does not
Desire a poem to be netted then
Stuck through its thorax with a pin. When caught
Empirically, a taxidermied wren
Results from captured poetry. No, let
The firefly wing away as far as moons
And stars. It does not want to be a pet.
A poem in the moonlight dies in noons.
Postmortems will result in splat.
White mystery’s a poem’s habitat.
~ Phillip Whidden