English Original
Ursa Major
an old spruce forest
also points
Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, 6:2, 2023
Millicent Bee
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
大熊座
一片古老的雲杉林
也指向它
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
大熊座
一片古老的云杉林
也指向它
Bio Sketch
Millicent Bee is a US-based haiku and senryu poet, First Frost Award winner, two-time Touchstone Award nominee, and author of The Haiku Foundation "Haiku of the Day" for December 1, 2025. Her work appears in top journals, including The Heron's Nest, Prune Juice, and tsuri-doro.
This haiku creates a vast, cinematic sense of scale by linking the cosmos to the ancient earth through a shared gesture.
ReplyDeleteL 1, "Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear," immediately places the reader beneath a night sky. Beyond simply naming a constellation, it evokes one of humanity's oldest celestial landmarks.
L 2 grounds the cosmic image in a specific terrestrial landscape. The "old spruce forest" carries its own sense of antiquity, complementing the timelessness of the constellation while bringing the reader back to earth.
The haiku's strongest feature is the double meaning of "points." On first reading, it is understood astronomically: Ursa Major points toward Polaris through its well-known pointer stars. L 3 then quietly opens a second reading. The pointed tops of spruce trees also point upward, echoing the constellation's gesture and visually connecting forest and sky.
The word "also" serves effectively as the haiku's conceptual pivot. With remarkable economy, it reveals an unexpected kinship between the stars and the trees. Neither dominates the other; instead, they participate in the same act of pointing.
The realization arrives gently in L 3, shifting the reader's gaze from the sky to the forest and then back upward again. In that subtle movement, the haiku dissolves the boundary between the celestial and the terrestrial, suggesting that both are part of a single, continuous landscape.