11:21pm June 17, 2015

Moth in my screen.

Computer screen shows
Moths flitting through air currents
Halfway cross the world

[Image description: At night, a brown moth flying in front of a white cone-shaped flower it’s about to pollinate.]

People are always saying that the interactions available online are too artificial, not real enough, not connected to nature, or any number of other complaints.  And as someone who learns best through senses not covered in online experience yet, I understand this sentiment completely.  However, I’m also someone who spent six years in bed.  During that time, seeing images from nature from all around the world was very important to me.  It gave me a chance to connect to things that, without a computer, i wouldn’t have even known existed.  And of course, I am always weirded out by a culture that sees beaver dams as natural and computers as artificial.

Haiku is a kind of poetry that, in its highest forms, evokes the natural world.  I wanted to write a poem showing how computers can connect us to nature, and haiku seemed like by far the best kind of poetry for the project.  I could have made this into a tanka, too – a haiku with two extra lines.  But i felt like I would use those lines for an explanation, and this poem needed to be able to stand on its own.  So I wrote the poem, wrote the explanation, and put it behind a cut so it would not show unless you wanted to read it.

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