Shambhala Sun | September 2009
You'll find "About a Poem" on the inside back page of the magazine.

Pico Iyer’s most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

About a Poem

Pico Iyer on a haiku by Kobayashi Issa

tsuyu no yo wa
tsuyu no yo nagara
sari nagara

This classic haiku could not be simpler. It features only two real words—the others are more or less particles—and these two words are the same, tsuyu, which means “dew.” A translation might read:

This world of dew
is a world of dew,
and yet, and yet.

Everything passes; that might be the first rule of the world.

Excerpted from the September 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun

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