I saw these signs in my yard today. I don't know why we didn't take them in. But it felt like a metaphor for democracy itself. So I wrote the haiku, trying to capture how disorienting it is to try to look back at that time, which isn't that long ago in days, but seems a lifetime away in traumas.
A haiku often captures a seasonal element or a change of seasons, and a senryu a human issue, sometimes comedic. If there is anything comedic here, it is tragicomedy. But certainly we are in a new season, where only Climate Change itself can be an apt metaphor for a too-hot political summer to come, one for which spring has given us only the barest hints of how bad it could be.
We need to start tending our gardens better. There are limits to what we can withstand in the climate, and the political climate. These are not just words.
My mind goes once again to a favorite quote from the excellent Asimov & Silverberg novel Nightfall (not the short story), when, after a complete disruption of society due to a global cataclysm, a psychologist named Sheerin who'd predicted social chaos reflects on his earlier predictions and how he feels about the way they played out:
«"It's one thing to predict it. It's something else to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing, … for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality. I was so glib, so blithely unconcerned. 'Tomorrow there won't be a city standing unharmed in all [the world]' I said, and it was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. 'The end of the world you used to live in.' Yes. Yes." Sheerin shivered. "And it all happened, just like I said. But I suppose I didn't really believe my own dire predictions, until everything came crashing down around me.»