Two porters are walking home along a country road at night. One can carry the empty kago—a kind of sedan chair—on his own, so the other man is briefly useless, his hands free. Instead of worrying about the journey or the work, he simply looks up. What he notices is the moon, ringed by a pale circle of light as clouds or mist drift across it.
The poem doesn’t tell us what he thinks. It doesn’t need to. In that small, unplanned pause, the ordinary business of returning home opens into something calm and luminous. The mood is quiet and a little mysterious: a moment of stillness between two working men, lightened by the moon’s white halo. The speaker’s feeling seems close to admiration or quiet wonder, but restrained—just a clear image of a man given a sudden, free moment to look at the sky.