Teeth Sensitive to the Sand

Teeth Sensitive to the Sand - fact Summary

A Domestic Sign of Aging

This short haiku records a domestic moment — finding sand in salad greens — and turns it into a lucid sign of advancing years. Basho frames bodily sensitivity as evidence of aging, using an everyday irritation to signal a larger personal change. The poem is grounded in the poet's own experience of getting older, compressing a sensory detail into clear, elegiac recognition without rhetoric or explicit moralizing.