​And What is the Heart? by Laura Ann Reed

Weeping Pine Tree, by Jacob Berghoef (Denmark) 2025

​And What is the Heart?
                                          --Ikkyū
                                             
To think that we are inhaling
the exhalation of stars.  A large idea.  
 
Is the sky’s mind kindred with ours?
If so, who’s doing the thinking?
 
Tonight before bed 
I read you the haiku selected at random:
 
The heart, what is it,
is it the sound of the pine trees
there in the painting?
 
Later, on the edge of sleep I say
“Yes, what better to be than emptiness?”
 
But unless you are dreaming
you’ve already stepped into oblivion.

Laura Ann Reed

Laura Ann Reed was born in Berkeley, California, earned her B.A. from The University of California, Berkeley which included a year at l’Université Aix-Marseille in France, and lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area before relocating to the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Grant Reed, in 2004. She earned a master’s degree in the performing arts and taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California before earning a master’s degree in clinical psychology.  Her work has been published in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence Volume II and has appeared in numerous journals in the United States, Great Britain and Ireland.  She is a contributing editor with the Montréal Review.