Tag: #senryu #poetry #poetrycommunity

Honored to be featured in Triveni Haikai India’s Spotlight feature today on 17th June 2025. Grateful to you dear @Kashiana Singh, Guest Editor for selecting this ku which is very close to my heart. Your writeup is brilliant whichnI have shared here.

Many thanks to dear Anju Kishore and Mohua Maulik for hosting this feature and to the Founder of Triveni Haikai India—Kala Ramesh for this space to learn and grow.

Mono no Aware: The Tenderness of Ending

In Japanese tradition, jisei—death poems composed by individuals on the brink of death—offer final reflections on life, impermanence, and the unknown beyond. Often brief, stark, and yet tender, these poems do not resist death but instead accept it as part of the natural rhythm of existence. Through nature imagery and minimalism, jisei endure as a person’s final parable, their distilled teaching to those left behind.

Haiku, too, teaches us to see each moment as both a birth and a death. In its nakedness, haiku captures the bardo moments described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead—transitions between realms, between states of being. Every moment we live contains the seed of both beginning and ending.

The Japanese aesthetic of mujo (impermanence) and mono no aware (“the beauty of transient things”) is naturally embedded in haiku, urging us to see not tragedy, but tenderness in the inevitable cycle of change.

In Indian philosophy, this cycle of life, death, and rebirth—samsara—is also seen as a sacred, continuous flow. Death is not a rupture but a return, part of the great wheel of existence. Acceptance of transitions, whether through mourning rituals, river immersions, or the lighting of a pyre, reflects a deep understanding that endings are inseparable from beginnings.

Thus, haiku echoes a universal wisdom across ancient cultures: to live is to move through endless openings and closings, with tenderness for what must pass.

Haiku strips away all but the essence. A poet can express an entire cosmos of grief, gratitude, and wisdom in just a few words. In contemplating death through haiku, we are also contemplating life—its urgency, tenderness, and fleeting beauty.

Through the acceptance of death, we are offered not despair but profound connection: to one another, to the seasons, and the moment-by-moment act of living.

This month, i bring to you a selection of haiku that speak directly to the themes of death, loss, rebirth, and the bittersweet beauty of transience

– Kashiana Singh