open sky :: SAMVAAD/ 14th December
- Aparna Pathak
- Dec 14, 2025
- 1 min read
hosts : Sanjuktaa Asopa & Aparna Pathak
whaling station— the weight of rust
on the snowline
-Ron C Moss
(3rd Anita Sadler Weiss Memorial Haiku Awards,2007, 2nd place;
Published in Dragonfly, 2007; republished in The Bone Carver by Ron C Moss, Snapshot Press, 2014)
Thank you so much, Ron, not only for letting us share your poem, but also for explaining the background so beautifully. I am sure our readers have loved it. I know I did.
Excellent haiku… well depicted!
Such a powerful environmental image and message.
What a brilliant haiku, Ron! The negative impact of man on the environment (rust sullying the purity of the snow) certainly came to mind—even before reading the background info. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you to the editors for selecting this haiku and I will attempt to recall the what, and how, that I came to write this one.
This haiku comes from a film I saw of an old whaling station and I think it was South America, and it might have been the Falklands Island (Islas Malvinas). I live in Tasmania, which has its own history of whaling and seal hunting in the early settlement days, when it was first a penal colony for the then British Empire. I have seen abandoned old ruins and remains of the whaling industry scattered about the island. I always wanted to capture something of this in a haiku.
Those were hard times and…