across the full moon
a small, dark cloud—
my mother’s “don’t go”
Edward Rielly, of Westbrook, Maine, is a professor of English and director of the Writing and Publishing Program at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. He has published approximately thirty books, including studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jonathan Swift, Native American history, the popular culture of the 1960s, detective fiction, baseball, and football. He has published children’s picture books and many collections of his own poetry, including several chapbooks of haiku. Rielly’s most recent works include Bread Pudding and Other Memories: A Boyhood on the Farm, which chronicles his youth on a small dairy farm in Wisconsin, and Answers Instead: A Life in Haiku. The latter, a retrospective selection of haiku published over a period of forty years and reflecting his life from youth to the present, recently received the Mildred Kanterman Memorial Award, an annual award sponsored by the Haiku Society of America. Rielly attributes his abiding interest in haiku to Father Raymond Roseliep, his creative writing instructor at Loras College and one of the pioneers of English-language haiku.