Thunder and Lightning

thunderheads
silhouetted by heat lightning--
pondless frog







A strike of lightning is something like the haiku image. It comes suddenly, at times unexpectedly, out of the cosmos. The good ones reverberate the way thunder does.

I'm reading a book called A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitzu, and Waka) compiled and translated by Soiku Shigematsu. Here's two haiku that have no author attributions:

a flash of lightning--
our life is
gone in a blink.

lightning strikes
mixing up
the dark night

Both a reminder of the dramatic lightning storm we are now having in our thunderfull Midwest.