We are less lonely in a world in which one thing touches another

 Loneliness—

 cicadas' crying 

darkens the stone

Matsuo Basho

tr. by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

From Jane Hirshfield's Ten Windows. These are some notes from the translator:

    The verb in this poem has been translated many ways - sometimes the cicadas' cries "pierce," sometimes they "soak," sometimes they "drill into" the stone. The literal meaning is closest to what happens when cloth is dyed, when one substance not only enters but alters another.

      I have chosen here a verb that brings with it that stone-darkening wetness. The exchange of feeling between human emotion, insect, and rock; the interpenetration of sound and substance, surface and interior, momentary and eternal; the released moistness of the cicadas' lacrimae rerum-these are the writing on this haiku's inner walls.

     We might also notice: the one thing the poem shows as shifting— the stone—is the one thing that, in the outer, objective world, would factually not. Yet the infusion of sympathetic response into inanimate rock washes back over both the crying insect and the human who silently listens and looks. That is Basho's unheroic and almost indiscernible act of rescue. We are less lonely in a world in which one thing touches another.