Following on from the posts on reality, existence, and God and consciousness, life, and time, here are the unintentional haiku that Haiku Detector found in the last three sections of New Scientist’s special issue with the ‘big questions’: the self, sleep, and death. The ‘self’ section has a haiku in an image caption:
The self may be a
necessary illusion
(Image: Darren Hopes)
I suppose it could make sense if somebody named Darren hopes that the self is an image:
The self may be a
necessary illusion
(image, Darren hopes)
The others are from the main text:
But we surely still
have the same self today that
we had yesterday.
For most people, most
of the time, the sense of self
is seamless and whole.
These ones are about sleep, perchance about dreaming:
Our emotional
undercurrents seem to be
the guiding force here.
This one requires ‘2008’ to be pronouned ‘two thousand eight’, not ‘two thousand and eight’:
In 2008,
hints emerged that these might be
the deeper stages.
The fountain of youth
may have been as close as our
bedrooms all along.
So it’s puzzling that
we still don’t really know why
it is that we sleep.
And finally, one on the final sleep, death:
When the risk is slight,
mild concern may be all that
is appropriate.
That’s all from that special issue of New Scientist, though the latest issue is dedicated to Shakespeare, so I hope to find some poetry in it. If there’s anything else you’d like me to mine for haiku, let me know!
While I was writing a poem a day, there would be times when I’d just feel like writing prose, for a break. I was hoping that this prose pressure would build up and I’d write something amazing when NaPoWriMo ended. Now that I’m trying to prioritise writing a short story for a competition, poems are trying to force their way out. So I still could manage 30 poems in 30 days, but I’m not going to pressure myself to post them by each midnight, and I won’t feel bad about posting found haiku when I don’t have a poem ready.
Creative Output 