Daily Haiku — Jun 28, 2026

The image sits in that word "old" arriving before its subject, so the poem opens with weight before we know what carries it — chess announced almost like a title, then revealed as ancient. From there the turn happens quietly: line one gives us the game, line two reframes it as war, and line three narrows the whole abstraction down to pieces and color. That's the compression at work — history and violence folded into a board small enough to hold in two hands. No season here, but there's a mood of long winter patience, the stillness of something rehearsed for centuries. What rewards rereading is how "black and white" does double duty — pieces, sides, and the old moral shorthand for conflict itself, so the closing image keeps refighting itself the longer you sit with it.