On Friday morning, the Poets & Storytellers United site, which links up short writings, posted a prompt that provoked a very long and serious answer. The Napowrimo site, which doesn't specify length except in the sense that finishing a poem in one day tends to suggest starting with a short simple idea, posted a prompt that provoked a haiku.
Well, they asked for poems that respond to our own favorite poems, and then they posted a haiku as an example. The one they chose was a different translation than I've memorized of a classic haiku. It brought to mind another classic haiku I've often quoted, also found in a few different translations:
Doing his very best
the snail takes a long time
to climb the mountain.
My understanding is that in Japanese there's an idea that the snail is seen by a poet climbing the mountain as a Buddhist meditation ritual, so who knows whether in some dim unconscious way the snail's little soul is seeking spiritual growth and enlightenment just as the poet is...
[Image from https://matsuobashohaiku.home.blog/2022/11/28/mt-fuji/ , which also has the Japanese words as written, a phonetic transcription, and a classic Japanese painting. I think the picture may be computer-generated; this is not a science post.]
In English the words are the sort of thing that come to mind when things just aren't working at the speed people reasonably expect and want them to work. Most especially a old laptop computer I treasured, as a gift from a friend, even as the version of Opera it could still run was locked out of more and more web sites...I called it the Sickly Snail. It was slow, but it always seemed to be doing its very best.
Nevertheless.
If the snail lives to
reach the summit, cheers! if not,
he had a good climb.
If you think of the snail in the same way I do, I suppose you might call this haiku a summary of the long poem that should appear here tomorrow morning.
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