November 23: Midges

Tonight when we came home from a movie, our porch light was swarmed by midges. Such an odd thing to see in late November, this cluster of insects. The unseasonably warm weather must have brought on a late hatch. Now that the light is turned off, will they just freeze and die? 

Drawn to the porch light,

one last hatch of little flies

lasts one more cold night.

A short aside on my prosody here: Traditional Japanese poetry from which the haiku is derived made use of significant word play; words that carried more than one meaning added extra layers and depth to a poem. Such cunning punning created the pivots on which the poem turned, as with "last" in this haiku. Interesting to stop and think about how it ironically means both "final" and "enduring." The end rhyme was unintentional, and I thought about changing the last word from "night" to "hour," but then I decided that I don't really mind the rhyme this time around.