Hello, poets! Another Haibun Monday has arrived, where we combine prose and haiku into the form known as haibun. Frank J. Tassone here, your host today for today’s festivities. Today, let’s contemplate Cold Mountain!

Winter continues in the northern hemisphere (as summer carries on south of the Equator). When the weather warms, however, the highest mountains maintain their own cold climates. Nevertheless, even the humbler peaks bear snow during the winter. Therefore, Cold Mountain can inspire us to wax haibun in a multitude of directions.

There is also another Cold Mountain:

Hanshan (Chinese: 寒山; pinyin: Hánshān; lit. ‘Cold Mountain’, fl. 9th century) is a figure associated with a collection of poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the Taoist and Chan tradition. No one knows who he was, when he lived and died, or whether he actually existed. In the ChineseBuddhist tradition, Hanshan and his sidekickShide are…