A human voice breaks in before the poem has said anything at all: "Hey." It's the sound of someone caught off guard, stepping outside or glancing out a window and noticing that the weather has changed. The scene that follows is small and unglamorous. It is sleeting, the wind smells of cow manure, and the speaker says goodnight to the moon. What looks like a throwaway remark turns out to hold a whole attitude toward the world: pay attention to what is actually there, even when it isn't pretty, and greet it with good humour.
The form is part of the joke and part of the point. Haiku is usually taught as three lines of five, seven and five syllables, but this poem comes in at roughly four, eight and three. It keeps the compression and the three-line shape and ignores the counting. The dash after "Hey" does the work of the pause that Japanese haiku traditionally gets from a "cutting word": it splits the poem between the speaker's exclamation and the observation that follows. The ampersand in the second line is a casual touch, the kind of shorthand you'd use in a note to yourself. Nothing here sounds like a monument. It sounds like a thought caught on the way past.
The imagery is carried mostly by the nose. Haiku tends to be thought of as a visual form, a picture in seventeen syllables, but here the wind "smells," and the senses are shuffled in a way that makes the line feel fresh. The cows never appear. They arrive only as a smell on the air, so two plain words, "cow manure," bring a whole farmyard into the poem. Judging by that detail, the speaker is close enough to livestock for the wind to carry them over, though the poem never says where they are standing. The phrase itself is also worth noticing. It is the neutral, almost polite term rather than a cruder one, which gives the line a dry comic edge. Sleet adds to this. It is neither rain nor snow, neither dramatic nor pretty, a half-hearted kind of weather that suits a half-hearted kind of night.
The sound of the poem supports this mood. The first line is brisk and slightly stumbling, with the break after "Hey" and the soft hiss of "sleeting." The second is the longest, and it rolls forward through a run of one-syllable words ("the wind smells of cow") before slowing on the two-beat "manure," as though the smell itself were spreading. The final line is the shortest, and its two heavy, drawn-out words, "Goodnight, moon," slow everything down. There is no rhyme, but "moon" and "manure" share a rounded vowel and an n, so the poem's loftiest word and its earthiest one end up sounding faintly alike.
That last line is where the poem turns. "Goodnight, moon" will remind many readers of the bedtime picture book *Goodnight Moon*, in which a child says goodnight to the things in a room. Whether the poet meant that echo is something the text can't confirm, but it fits, because the line has the same hushed, lullaby-like simplicity. It also plays against the moon's usual role in poetry, where it is a classic subject for admiration and longing. Here there is no description of its glow or its beauty. With sleet falling, the moon is presumably hidden behind cloud (an inference, since the poem never says so), so the speaker is saying goodnight to something they can't see. The farewell can be read as tender, as wry, or as both. The speaker accepts the night as it is and doesn't pretend it's romantic.
That mix of tenderness and comedy is what makes the poem worth reading. It sets the grand and the grubby side by side, the moon above and the manure on the wind, and it doesn't rank them. The sleet and the smell are not treated as flaws in the evening that spoil the poetry. They are the evening, and the poem is about noticing them. In fifteen or so syllables it shows that a haiku can be conversational, that it can be funny without being flippant, and that a poem can end on a small gesture of affection for a moon it cannot even see.