Poem Interpretation

Examining three

Thousand haiku carefully,

The two persimmons.

~ Shiki

The reader, far too Western, so it seems,

Blinks, flummoxed by the haiku.  He or she

Can’t grasp how two fruit spheres, unless in dreams

Of Japanese imagination, see

Their way to understanding Buddhist thought.

Two transmigrational persimmons might

Still hold the souls passed on and ought

Then maybe have a sacred second sight.

But this seems stupid since a haiku reads

Complexly, never mind the larger sum

Of poems.  Oriental thought proceeds

Untroubled, marching to a distant drum.

  Gone “I”-ness in the haiku, killed, left out,

    Hides readings clear as “Banzai!” in a shout.

After Microsoft Bing’s AI generator successfully put those portraits of Shiki into those persimmons (though it struggled against my instructions), I asked it to put the above portrait of me into a persimmon.  Bing repeatedly failed to put my face into a persimmon.  I gave up.  I finally realized that Bing couldn’t do it  I had hoped to use the image of me in a persimmon in this post.  Nope.  Microsoft is Fartificial Unintelligence.