Kaga no Chiyo’s best-known haiku centers on a morning glory tangled around a well bucket. In Japanese, the poem begins “asagao ya,” meaning “morning glory!”
The poem imagines Chiyo going to draw water and finding that the flower’s vine has wound itself around the bucket or its rope. Rather than tear the plant away, she chooses to ask a neighbor for water. The small incident becomes a graceful expression of delicacy, compassion, and respect for living beauty.
Chiyo, also called Chiyo-ni, was an Edo-period poet from Kaga Province who began writing haiku remarkably young. Morning glory is also the poem’s kigo, or seasonal word, traditionally associated with autumn in Japanese poetry. Translations vary: some emphasize the entangled bucket, while others render the final phrase as “I ask for water.”
The flower is not a chrysanthemum, plum blossom, or cherry blossom. Those plants are important in Japanese poetic tradition, but they do not belong to this famous well-bucket scene.