At the Hut of the Small Mind: a tanka sequence

Sanford Goldstein’s ‘At the Hut of the Small Mind’ is a classic of English-language tanka. As much a work of Zen as of tanka, it was written while the author spent several days on a natural farm operated by a Japanese Zen master. While there he met several other seekers, but most of all, he met himself. It may have been a black butterfly winging into his hut to escape the rain, or a white hen who joined the seekers at the master’s feet, but there are messages here. Subliminal messages that require a mind free from the distractions of daily life to open to them and their is-ness. The reader, like the poet, arrives with ambiguities and departs with them, but somewhere in the middle something changes. The satori that eluded the poet at the beginning of the sequence is found in the hairstyles of sumo wrestlers at the end. This is intuitive poetry. Like Zen, it can’t be explained in words. The reader can only follow the poet’s footsteps and draw their own conclusions.-M. Kei, author of January, A Tanka Diary