re:Virals 558

“More difficult than making your own verses interesting is understanding those of others…” ―Shinkei (1406 –1475). Citing this, Onitsura (1661 – 1738) wrote: “…this should be a way in which a person is completely given over to training.”

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Melissa. This week’s poem, chosen by Shannon Blood was:

gulp! 
our resident bullfrog 
swallows a swallow
 — Henry W. Kreuter 
Fractured by Cattails 2023 Haiku Society of America Members' Anthology

Introducing this poem, Shannon Blood writes:

Host comment (Melissa):

My initial reaction to this verse was to laugh at its humour and playful language, however, on a second reading I began to feel unsettled by the thought of a bullfrog swallowing a bird, it reminded me of nature documentaries that I sometimes watch from behind a cushion with one eye shut. No matter how many times I read this I can’t get this image out of my head. Nature isn’t kind, and to dust off an overused saying is red in tooth and claw. And yet I like this haiku, particularly the use of onomatopoeia in line 1 with the word gulp, as this is where the drama happens. It is visceral. Horror. In that one action, the swallow is no more. Maybe that is why this haiku both attracts and repels me as there is honesty and a brutal truth about existence here that is unavoidable.

Dan Campbell:

A ONE MINUTE PLAY INSPIRED BY A POEM

The Swallow and the Bullfrog: A one-minute play by Dan

Characters
DAN, sitting in a swamp
BULLFROG, a longtime resident of the swamp.
SWALLOW, passing through

A summer afternoon. DAN sits on a log near a bullfrog resting motionless on a lily pad.

DAN
I’ve been watching this fellow for most of the afternoon.
He hasn’t moved an inch.
If enlightenment comes to frogs, it probably looks like this.

A swallow darts overhead.

SWALLOW
The sky is mine!
I have crossed rivers, lakes and swamps.
I am faster than the wind.

DAN
Confidence, that probably comes from having wings.

The bullfrog remains perfectly still.

SWALLOW
Look at that frog down there.
A fool pretending to be Buddha.

DAN
A foolish assumption.

The bullfrog suddenly lunges.

BULLFROG
Gulp!
The swallow disappears.

DAN
Well.
The bird’s name became its destiny.

The bullfrog blinks.

DAN
Language occasionally performs small miracles.
A swallow swallowed.

BULLFROG
Burp.

DAN
And there goes the final edit.

The bullfrog settles back onto the lily pad.

DAN
The pond returns to silence.
The bullfrog returns to meditation.
And somewhere, I suspect, whoever invented the word “swallow” is feeling rather pleased with himself or herself.

Blackout.

Jennifer Gurney:

I chuckled out loud at Kreuter’s whimsical haiku. Starting with a word filled with onomatopoeia, this poem drew me in. I was at the pond side, hearing the bullfrog, waving away the mosquitos and soaking in the day. And then the word play of “swallows a swallow” hooked me for good. Well done!

Radhamani sarma:

We are living in world of land reforms, modern methods of agriculture, plunder and exploitation, quick gulps, easy money in all ways, do we find a solution for all these shortfalls? No! is the quick answer for some.  This haiku begins with the word “gulp”!  Who is to gulp, what is there to gulp, why and how often?  We gulp water mostly with a sound peculiarly audible. With the same gulp human beings can destroy whilst at the same time satisfying one’s needs and ego.

The second and third line leads us to further conjecture: the affluent and copious robbing the have-nots, the poor yielding to the dominant powerful and wealthy. The ‘resident’ bullfrog might signify that this knows the ways and means how to cheat and plunder the common and simple.

Similarly the bullfrog with a big croak eats/swallows small insects. The contrast in the wording “bullfrog swallows /a swallow/ the huge and the tiny brings out the big and small in the action . The swallow gifted with a short bill eats tiny insects; but a huge bullfrog in no time swallows “a swallow”, repeat the following, the repetition captures a rhythm of sail and sorrow and swallow.  The full grown swallow with a cute bill and long wings is soon in the mouth of bullfrog , that is the beauty of this haiku. In no time the winged swallow is shrunken in the huge bullfrog’s mouth and disappears.

Here is a quote on swallow:
“When life turns out to become a muddy pool, we have got to recognize we must fire away and get down to leave for limpid waters and take possession of our dream to follow the flight of the swallows that still hover high in the blue sky of our memory. (“Halt in flight”)” ― Erik Pevernagie.

On the whole, a wonderful haiku of worldly wisdom and and human foibles.

Sitarama Seshu Maringanti:

Frogs of different sizes were commonly found everywhere in India. Their populations, however, appeared to proliferate suddenly during the rainy season of July to November. Being amphibians, they could survive the hot and dry months. My own experience with the Bull Frogs was through their signature calls during the season of heavy rains. Their calls, often of a high decibel nature, disturbed our sleep during the nights.

Henry W Kreuter’s haiku has brought my college days to memory when I had Biology as the Main subject of study. One important prescription of study was to identify the habitat of the amphibian in and around the city where I studied. During those days, specimens of frogs and fish were bought by my college for dissection by us. The breaking open of the cranium and nervous system of the frogs was mandatory for us. We did it with much reluctance, however. As part of the study of the life cycle of the Indian Bull Frog, we had to observe and record how the frogs caught and swallowed their prey. As mentioned in the haiku by the poet, the frogs were seen patiently waiting at the edge of their habitat – a puddle or pool of water – in order to catch and gulp their prey, usually small frogs, sometimes unsuspecting small birds landing nearby to drink water. Sometimes, even small snakes that just hatched from the eggs became their prey.

The haiku reveals the poet’s keen eye for detail – of a ‘resident’ Bull Frog’s habitat and its life cycle. The detail is packed tight in the haiku to convey the act of gulping a sparrow by the frog.  Incidentally, I may mention that using the frogs for dissection in college labs has since been banned in India to save the species from extinction.

Sudha Devi Nayak:

Bullfrogs with their distinctive bellow and voracious appetites are predators that overpower and consume small creatures. The bullfrog here is a permanent visitor, a bullfrog in residence in the poet’s garden who can gulp down a beautiful, innocent defenceless swallow without compunction and feel fulfilled. I wonder if this poem can be a metaphor for the times that are, where power depends not on a principle but random exercise of will or caprice. No shared expectations, or values or reciprocity. Think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the US-Israeli war on Iran, assaults on sovereign states through military strength.

The bullfrog exemplifies the Greek historian Thucydides’ famous quote “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.  The bullfrog is the tyrant, the Colossus who strides the world and his victims are small luckless creatures struggling to survive the odds.

The haiku is also a reminder that our struggles are not only against physical beings but faceless systems and institutions, tedious bureaucracies with their complicated procedures with their series of do’s and don’ts.  Times are as Kafkaesque as they were during Kafka’s days, where ordinary people not warriors or saints are searching for clarity in the confusion of a process. A process that is ruled by obscure offices, dusty files and faceless systems, algorithms and miles of data. We are abandoned in a maze built by others forever seeking a way out.  We are drowning in a sea of loneliness even amidst crowds and busy households because all we want is understanding – not a wall of indifference. In a world of wars, climate disasters, social inequality how does one make sense of one’s life live with hope among forces that forever let us down? And yet there is hope and dignity, that small, stubborn spark that does not surrender and enlarges one’s humanity in spite of locked doors and unreachable people.

Even as the bullfrog gobbles up the weak, timid and the unwary it must remember that there are no ultimate winners in the power game of might is right. It too will end up in a menu at a table. As Confucius says “The wheel of fortune is incessantly turning, which of us can say I shall be uppermost?” So the resident bullfrog stays until he is called for.

Sean Murphy:

What a peculiar poem! It strikes me as almost more of a senryu than a haiku, despite its non-human subject matter. I think it’s the second line that brings me there: “our resident bullfrog.” Despite the absence of humans within the verse, this line implies a decidedly human context, emphasizing the poet’s relationship to the subject and placing the poem in a park or a backyard, a space that humans have claimed as “theirs” (a designation that the bullfrog is cheerfully oblivious to.)

In imagining the space as a human one, the bullfrog, too, is imagined as familiar, a fixture of this comfortable, curated environment. The language surrounding it is playful in a way that implies a sort of friendly, one-sided rapport; the poet feels at ease enough in the bullfrog’s company to make light of the way it eats. (The bullfrog, of course, couldn’t care less what the human is saying.) There’s a tension to that familiarity, though; the actual action of the poem is slightly morbid, a primal act of predation and consumption that reminds us that the bullfrog is not, in fact, a resident of this artificial space that we’ve built around it, but a wild animal, which must eat other animals to live. If there is kinship to be found with the bullfrog, it is not in the bullfrog’s proximity to us, but in our likeness to it; we too, are animals, who must eat other animals to live — and who sometimes make funny noises while doing so.

Pamela Garry:

I am not sure what pronoun our resident bullfrog prefers. IMHO, ‘they/them’ is just too plural. So for just this occasion, I will assign ‘she/her’. I don’t know why she swallowed that bird. I’m quite sure it was not absurd. Perhaps to eat the flies that wiggled and tickled inside the swallow. I bet she’d have swallowed a frog if it had been there instead. I wonder if someday she might swallow her own head. She seems quite limitless with her abilities. Hats off to our bullfrog, who so swiftly nourishes herself. If I were a lobster, I’d rather be food for her than for a customer in a fresh seafood restaurant. Blah!

Urszula Marciniak life hinges on a single moment:

This poem sounds wonderful in English. The situation is also favourable for the hungry frog. The swallow didn’t even have time to notice that it would no longer fly and catch equally surprised flies.

How often do we live as if we were never going to meet a frog. We put things off until tomorrow. We hold grudges, we don’t forgive. We accumulate material goods. We don’t rest.

In an instant, everything can change.  We are most surprised when it happens to our loved ones. They disappear in the blink of an eye, and yet we haven’t told them so many important things. Remorse torments us even more than the sense of loss. It’s time to change that, now, immediately. The frog could be anywhere, perfectly hidden. Every moment counts, every moment could be the last.  Disappearance always terrifies us, even if it’s just the disappearance of a wallet from a pocket. Our children can vanish without a trace, and we’ll search for them for years, not knowing if they’re still on this side or the other. We can’t control everything. Let us do well what we can. Let us seize opportunities to do good, for they too may disappear.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Urszula has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, to a maximum of 500 words (succinctness will be valued);  academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic. As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems. Please note that commentaries must be your own personal work.

Poem for commentary:

     
empty crab shell —
the tide
through it 
— Jacek Margolak, Poland
  
Issue 74 – Sea Creature Haiku

Footnote

Unfortunately we have been unable to locate the author this week for comment or biography.

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

Comments: further discussion is invited below. Comments will close after a week when this post is archived.

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator (the host of this post) or the President here.