I was kind of excited that my critique of a poem was featured by the Haiku Foundation and below is the poem, my critique of the poem and the link to the complete article on the Haiku Foundation website.
The poem:
Show me the sutra
In which the Buddha praises
The colors of beer.
—Barry Foy, Haikuniverse, November 18, 2025
My critique: I’ve long suspected that we take spirituality far more seriously than it asks to be taken. This mischievous poem makes the same point. What feels quietly subversive here isn’t the mention of beer, but the poem’s resistance to the idea that wisdom must always sound serious. The speaker’s playful challenge doesn’t ridicule spirituality so much as loosen its collar.
We tend to assume that seriousness is the price of admission to truth, and that humor somehow cheapens whatever it touches. The Buddha here functions less as a figure of doctrine than as a symbol of disciplined detachment, and when that symbol is set beside beer—with all its sociability, messiness, and sensory appeal—the poem hints that our reverence may have stiffened into something more like habit than insight.
What matters is that the poem doesn’t imagine the Buddha drinking beer, but admiring its colors. That difference is doing a lot of work. The humor isn’t really about indulgence; it’s about attention. Color means stopping, looking, and noticing what’s right in front of you. Read this way, the poem quietly nudges beer out of the category of excess and into something closer to mindfulness, treating an ordinary pleasure as worthy of contemplation.
The poem’s rebellion isn’t aimed at religion itself but at a kind of moral seriousness that leaves little room for joy, curiosity, or play. By wrapping its challenge in humor, the poem sidesteps preaching and invites reflection by way of delight. We laugh first, and only afterward begin to wonder why.
In the end, the poem offers a gently subversive suggestion: that laughter isn’t a distraction from enlightenment but one way of approaching it. Humor loosens our grip on the categories we cling to—sacred and profane, spiritual and worldly—and makes room for connections we might otherwise overlook. In praising the colors of beer, the poem ends up praising something else as well: the idea that wisdom, much like laughter, often arrives indirectly, without ceremony, and with a smile.
Link to the complete article:
Essays, Art and Plays by Dan 
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