The title asks a question, and the first line replies with another: "For what? I don't know." Everything after that grows out of the admission. The speaker is hurting and waiting, and cannot even name what the waiting is for. "Unable to figure it out on my own, / I run straight to the temple": the verb "run" gives the opening a breathless urgency. Yet the poem never tells us what the temple said. The answers the speaker went looking for do not arrive. Instead the poem turns outward to weather and landscape, and that turn carries its central idea. Some questions are not solved but outwaited, and the clock that matters is the one kept by the seasons.
The title's "How long?" does get an answer, just not a numerical one. It comes in two parallel clauses: "until the rain turns to snow, / until the moon returns." These are changes of state, not counts of days: water altering its form, a moon coming back around. The repeated "until" gives the stanza the pace of a quiet incantation. The small word "too" in "They, too, must wait" matters as well. "They" are the questions, treated almost like fellow petitioners in a queue. The speaker is not alone in waiting, even if the company is only unanswered things.
The second stanza is built as a single fragment with no main verb: "The questions of my suffering, / like so many yellow leaves / hitting the newly frozen ground." The sentence never completes itself, which suits a mind that cannot reach a conclusion. The simile is carefully chosen. "So many" suggests how numerous and wearying the questions are. "Yellow" belongs to things that have finished living. "Hitting" is blunter than "falling" or "drifting," and "newly frozen" ground will not cushion anything. Judging by this imagery, the poem sits at the threshold between autumn and winter, and the speaker seems to be caught in a similar in-between state.
Then comes the poem's boldest move. The moon, when it returns, is "a blue blossom / in the middle of the forest." A flower in a frozen wood should not exist, and the metaphor holds hope and impossibility together. Blue is cold and distant, and it stands against the yellow of the dead leaves. The line break helps. "Until the moon returns" ends the third stanza on a comma, and the reader must cross the white space before the image appears. The form makes us wait for it, as the speaker must.
The last lines isolate and empty the scene: "where no one, / not even the ever watchful crow, / is at home." Placing "no one" alone on its own line makes the absence visible on the page. Calling the forest a home that nobody is in is oddly tender and oddly lonely. The echo of "even" and "ever" slows the line, and the crow, described as the one creature that would notice, is missing. The blossom therefore appears unwitnessed. That can read as bleak, since no one will see the consolation. It can also read as freeing, since the moon returns whether or not anyone watches. Notably, the "I" of the first stanza never reappears. The speaker seems to dissolve into the landscape, as if the only way to wait well is to loosen one's grip on the self.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its stanzas run four, three, three and five lines, and the lines are short and plain, mostly built from simple words. The blunt, conversational opening gives way to a more image-driven voice, and the final stanza is the longest, as though the poem were opening out into the forest.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It does not pretend the temple solved anything or invent a comforting answer. It admits not knowing, and in place of resolution it offers a way of waiting, patient and unhurried, modeled on rain turning to snow and a moon coming back. For a reader, the gaps are the lesson: what the temple said and what the speaker is waiting for are left out, and the silence does as much work as the images.