starlight
my baby’s last day
within me

© Tia Nicole Haynes (USA)
Incense Dreams 2.2, 2018

When I read this haiku, I could not understand it completely. I felt it was missing something. However, I saw that it has two possible interpretations for me:

1. The first scenario is of a mother who has decided upon getting an abortion. In spiritual traditions, the soul can neither be created nor destroyed. Physical bodies are merely vessels to contain it. Maybe the mother thinks after the abortion, though her baby ceases to exist within her, her soul will still exist as eternal as starlight. It may be a consolation to her—a way to assuage her guilt over the decision.

The second scenario is something like this: it is the day of her child’s birth but the mother is fearful of bringing her child into the brutal, unforgiving world. But there is nothing she can do except surrender. She believes conscious intelligence, which is responsible for starlight, will take care of her baby too.

This haiku is haunting. It lingers in the mind long after you’ve read it.

– Pragya Vishnoi (India)

A haiku of extreme simplicity, where every superfluous word has
been eliminated, until reaching the harmony of a well-calibrated synthesis. A scene of great silence and contemplation, in which a mother deeply feels the completeness of having within herself an essential part to which she will have to give up. Ephemeral completeness of which the cold light of the stars, in their apparent immutability, acts as a counterpoint.

I am not here to ask myself why this mother already knows that tomorrow her child will no longer be with her. Perhaps she will have a planned birth. Perhaps she has decided not to let him or her be born—a very painful hypothesis that cannot be excluded.

I want to see it as a programmed birth and read this mother as a person that from one thing that is now forming a creature that is about to divide with a psychologically and physically important laceration. Many years have passed since the birth of my daughters, but I remember the sense of emptiness and above all the physical experiences in the following days … I had to let go of a part of my body in a certain sense.

I sometimes try to remember that feeling of total well-being that gave me the feeling of having a moving creature inside me, and I try to remember it with the sensations of the body, not with the reminiscences of the mind.
The key of this haiku is in the “within me” that closes the poem: so important, so well chosen, so firm even in its sound.

– Margherita Petriccione (Italy)

A beautiful haiku that shows a deep connection between a mother and her child. The vast imagery of the universe and its deep connection with a womb is profoundly depicted in this exquisite poem where both outer and inner universes connect through subtle feelings and the imaginative portrayal of motherhood.

The starlight beautifies the space with its soft and gentle light that spreads all over the universe. It looks more like a blanket of sparkling dots that tickles one’s imagination. The mother imagines the same starlight inside her as her baby is close to her and he or she signifies the whole universe that glorifies her motherhood and the inner world. The last day is the celebration of the most beautiful creation of the world: a child. Only a mother can feel and see the whole universe celebrating it with her. The starlight may symbolize the firework that sparkles in her thoughts and feelings due to this jubilant arrival of her baby.

– Hifsa Ashraf (Pakistan)

Did you enjoy this poem and commentary? Let us know in the comments.

– Painting by Vincent van Gogh