Issue 5 – June 2026 – Editor’s Choice
perhaps, for a moment,
clambering out of the lake
with a catfish
skewered on its beak,
the heron is awkward
Randy Brooks, USA
One of the most frequent targets of Japanese kyōka was poetic cliches, overused tropes, tired metaphors. All frogs sing, all herons are graceful. Herons are generally graceful birds but they too have moments when they stumble and struggle. Observing such a moment somehow makes the heron more of a real individual we can feel for in its moment of awkwardness. We are not, unless we are cruel, laughing at the heron but at the clichéd ideal of heron-hood it has, in this situation, failed to embody.
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