obscurata

This is Lady K’s only household haiku, written about her father smoking two cigarettes simultaneously at her first wedding.

Good dad wipes his eyes
Cigarette dangles, candy
Drips from fingertips

– Lady K

Lady asked me to explain my scorpion-frog haiku from yesterday. This is a fair request since it’s way too enigmatic.

Frog and scorpion
Pollution in the river
Need kill desire

This is based on the famous parable of the scorpion asking the frog to carry it across the river on its back. The frog says no way, if I carry you on my back, you’ll sting me and I’ll die and we’ll both drown. The scorpion says don’t worry, I won’t sting you in the middle of the river because then we’d both die and that would be against my better interests. So the frog says okay, the scorpion hops on, they head across, and halfway across the river the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog is dying he cries out “Why did you sting me? Now you’ve killed both of us.” The scorpion simply replies, “It’s my nature.”

So the pollution in the river in this haiku is the bodies of the frog and scorpion on one level, but the larger level is the “need / kill / desire” selfishness that’s killing off our human civilization. (I like what Gandhi said when he was asked what he thought of Western Civilization:”What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.”)

Not a good haiku because too dense, too esoteric, too enigmatic. But what is one to do late at night when that’s what appears in one’s brain, especially when the scorpion perfectly sums up our current rash of politicians and the frog exemplifies our country?