Daily Haiku, Oct 6, 2026

This little poem works by never naming its subject, letting the riddle do the holding. The first line promises loyalty, something steady and almost sentimental — the kind of comfort you'd expect from a companion, a memory, maybe a habit. Then the second line drops you into weather: dark nights, cold days, a season that feels more like a mood than a calendar date. That's the turn, the warmth of line one meeting the chill of line two, and suddenly the "friend" reads less cozy and more like shadow, or sleep, or worry itself.

The closing line is where the compression pays off. Hard, yet easy to escape sounds like a contradiction until you realize both halves are true of the same thing — it depends only on whether you move toward the light. Three lines, no explanation, and it still rewards a second pass.