Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
I live life
with defiant joy,
all the way.
Defiance ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #328
An earlier version of this post responded to a challenge inspired by Basho’s last haiku, written when he knew he was dying. Contributors were asked to imagine Basho writing a haiku for his closest followers from his deathbed. While I admired the resulting excellent sad poems, I defied the expectation of sadness and imagined Basho rallying briefly to encourage his companions with a pair of short haiku in 3-5-3.
My response to the previous challenge bungled the initial line of Mortality #2. My first thought was that Basho might tell his followers to
Live your lives / with defiant joy, / …
Telling people like me how to live is a reliable way to elicit angry defiance, so I rejected my first thought, neglected to defy my own fondness for alliteration, and settled on
Let’s live life / with defiant joy, / …
despite some misgivings. Hmmm. Wish I had used
I lived life / with defiant joy, / …
as what Basho might say on his deathbed. Hmmm. I can use it now in the present tense because I am still fairly healthy for my age, in defiance of the odds against those who bungle things more consequential than a line of poetry. So I use it in the revised Mortality #2 here, with defiant joy.
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Mellow Curmudgeon 
“…in defiance of the odds against those who bungle things more consequential than a line of poetry.” I would guess this is a universal experience. Ah, a human bond.
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Not entirely sure, but I read “universal experience” as a reference to bungling (not being healthy or defiant). 😉
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I did have in mind that, for those of us who reach a certain age, we begin to recognize that our good health is indeed in defiance of the odds we created for ourselves by having, throughout our younger lives, bungled any number of things more consequential than a line of poetry. I know I have. I think feeling that way is almost inevitable if we spend any time looking back, which I know I do. I guess I see myself as a fairly representative sample of humanity, lol.
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