Marianne Bluger’s Early Evening Pieces is a quiet meditation on the passage of time. Her poems capture the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Like Bashō before her, she finds the infinite within the finite yet her voice is her own.
the moonlit station
empty as a train whistles
through the small town
The train—like time itself—is already vanishing into the night, leaving only absence in its wake. The station, abandoned, hums with the echoes of what was and what will never be again.
soft summer darkness
resting the oars I glide
on floating stars
In this moment, the boundary between water and sky disappears. The self drifts somewhere between the two, weightless, unburdened, as if carried by the gentle motion of the world.
hands stiff with cold
raking leaves in the wind
I miss my kids
The stark simplicity of these lines makes their emotional weight even heavier. There is no embellishment, no metaphor—only the quiet ache of a life now scattered like the leaves she gathers.
Conclusion
Early Evening Pieces is more than a collection of haiku—it is an invitation to pause, to notice, to feel. With a keen eye and a reverence for simplicity, she transforms ordinary moments into profound reflections.
Whether evoking the hush of a moonlit train station, the weightlessness of a drifting canoe, or the quiet loneliness of raking autumn leaves, Bluger honors the haiku traditions while carving out a voice uniquely her own—one rooted in personal memory, in quiet observation, in the fleeting beauty of the everyday.
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You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. Please share your favorite poem from the book with us.
Essays, Art and Plays by Dan 
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