birds, haiga, haiku, photography

Vocal Visitor

Caw from unseen bird.
Crows are louder and shriller.
Could be a raven.

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Overlay © John Cobb | Unsplash

While my own sightings are few and long ago, I believe ravens still inhabit the region where I live and am confident that I can distinguish the croaking caw of a raven from the canonical caw of a crow.  (Don’t hike much any more; still big on alliteration.)  I also have some of indigenous folklore’s admiration of ravens, so I celebrated hearing one with a haiku.  That posed a problem.

An ordinary image of a raven would not work for my haiku about an unseen bird thought to be a raven.  I considered posting the haiku by itself, but I like images.  Hmmm.  I can photograph the nondescript view toward where the call seemed to originate.  Can I then find and tweak an image of a raven to make a ghostly overlay that fits the mood of the haiku?  Yes!

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haiga, haiku, philosophy, photography, science

Mortality and Defiance

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~ Mortality #1 ~
Emergent
from dancing atoms,
life is short.
~ Mortality #2 ~
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.

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