Last night before going to bed, I wrote
目が重いでも終わらせるこの俳句
me ga omoi demo owaraseru kono haiku[1]
eyes heavy
but I must finish
this haiku
As I’ve written before, I try to make myself write at least one haiku everyday. I don’t really think most of them are very good, but I write anyway. That’s not me being modest, just realistic. Even the best baseball players rarely hit much above .300 (that’s a 30% hit rate for the baseball illiterate). To continue the baseball metaphor, I don’t take so many swings because I’m expecting to hit them all, I mostly just want to stay in the habit—and I enjoy writing them too.
The other night I was tired and ready for bed. It had been a long day. But then I realized I hadn’t yet written any haiku for that day. So I pulled out a notecard and … sat thinking. And thinking. And thinking. I might have nodded off a few times in there.
Then, it came to me, and I wrote down the above. And almost immediately went into the bedroom and fell asleep.
A little meta, perhaps, and playfully, but some haiku are both those things. Issa, who is generally considered the one of the greatest haikuists of all time, wrote some 20,000+ haiku in his life—which works out to several every single day of his adult years—and many of them were meta too, so I’m in good company.