Anyone who knows the story of Goldilocks will recognise the verdict at the end of Mike Stone's tiny poem. "Some he loved too much, / Some he loved not near enough, / Some he loved just right." The phrase "just right" carries an echo of the porridge test, now applied to the human heart. The central idea is that love is a question of quantity as well as feeling. You can give too much or too little, and hitting the right amount is harder than it looks.
The poem tells us almost nothing about who is being loved. "Some" has no noun attached. It could mean people, places, or passions, and the poem leaves the reader to decide. The speaker also stays outside the story: it is "he", never "I", and everything is in the past tense. The effect is of someone summing up a life from a distance, like a ledger being closed. The tone is calm and slightly amused, but the pattern underneath suggests a kind of ache.
The form is a haiku in the strict syllable sense, five, seven and five. Stone's poem has no nature image, the usual home of the haiku. Its imagery comes from measurement: "too much," "not near enough," "just right." Even "near" is telling, because it turns love into distance, something you can fail to get close to. There is also a small irony in the shape. The line about falling short, "Some he loved not near enough," is the longest of the three, as if lack needed more room to explain itself. The line about excess is the shortest. Whether by design or not, the lengths run against what the words say.
The sound of the poem helps hold it together. Each line opens with "Some he loved," so the poem moves like a chant or a tally, with only the verdict changing. A short "u" sound hums through it in "some," "loved," "much," "enough," and "just." "Much" and "enough" share that vowel closely, so "too much" and "not enough" sound like cousins, as if excess and shortage were the same mistake seen from opposite sides. Then comes "right," the first line-ending word with a different, longer vowel. After all that humming the poem finishes on a clean, hard click.
Punctuation adds to this. Commas follow the first two lines, and only the last gets a full stop. The whole poem is one sentence, and it doesn't come to rest until the right measure is found. In the version printed here, a gap also separates the first line from the rest. It works like a held breath between the admission of too much love and the rest of the list.
The title, "Love Being Haiku," can be read in more than one way. It might mean "love, being a haiku," or it might name the very state of love. Either way, the poem practises what it describes. A haiku is a form where a syllable too many or too few spoils the whole thing, and Stone's poem has exactly seventeen. In its own terms, it is "just right," and that is its neatest trick. The poem argues for balance and also demonstrates it.
The poem is significant because it packs so much into so little. In three lines it suggests a whole history of affection, with its mistakes and its rare successes, without a single name or event. It is easy to remember and easy to repeat, but it leaves a question behind: which kind of loving would you be in? The ordering is gentle but pointed. There are two ways to miss, "too much" and "not near enough," and only one way to get it right. The poem never says how many loves fall into each group. The shape alone, with two ways to fail and one to succeed, hints that "just right" is the narrowest target. That is a modest claim, but the poem's neatness and light humour make it hard to forget.