English Original
moonlight ...
more cat than a cat
its shadow
Presence, 84, 2026
Millicent Bee
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
月光 ...
比貓更像貓
它的影子
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
月光 ...
比猫更像猫
它的影子
Bio Sketch
Millicent Bee is a US-based poet, First Frost Award winner, and two-time Touchstone Award nominee. Her work appears in numerous haiku, senryu, and poetry journals.
This cat haiku works beautifully. It is playful, mysterious, and quietly uncanny, capturing the essence of “catness” through the lens of a classic haiku subject—the moon.
ReplyDeleteL 2, “more cat than a cat,” is especially effective, both thematically and emotionally. Anyone familiar with cats knows how they can stretch, contort, and move in ways that seem almost physically impossible. The poem takes that familiar quality of exaggerated feline movement and transfers it to the cat’s shadow (L3), elongated and distorted by moonlight (L 1). The result is both humorous and strangely magical: the shadow appears to embody an intensified version of the animal itself.
The haiku also creates a compelling juxtaposition between the softness and vastness of “moonlight” and the sharply defined, exaggerated silhouette of a domestic animal. The moon gives the scene an ancient, almost primordial atmosphere, while the cat keeps it intimate, familiar, and playful.
There is also a subtle reversal at work: rather than the cat casting an ordinary shadow, the shadow seems to reveal a truer, more extravagant version of the cat. In that sense, “more cat than a cat” becomes more than a joke—it suggests that the shadow has somehow captured the essential, exaggerated spirit of the animal.
The haiku therefore feels simultaneously ancient and entirely fresh: a moonlit encounter with something utterly ordinary that, for a moment, becomes strange.