UPDATED SHAKESPEARIAN SENRYU *
To be; not to be;
These options nail the question,
"Why bear Fortune's woes?"
Lead samurai-SEALS
Against Hokusai's "Great Wave",
Or halt tsunamis?
Death curtails REM-sleep,
Avoids defibrillation,
Cures anginal bouts.
The consummation?
End ills that flesh is heir to;
Devoutly that's wished.
Make your quietus --
Bare bodkins, available,
Provide an off-ramp.
(A few may prefer
The rite of harakiri,
Per Clavell's "Shogun").
Otherwise, why bear
Badly sung karaoke,
Life's weary fardels,
Whips and scorns of time,
Head honcho's contumely,
The crowded onsen,
Smart-alec geishas,
Lawsuits' judicial delay,
And long-lived phone-queues?
Die, sleep; dreams might loom,
When mortal coil's shuffled off,
As grim show-stopper.
Post-mortem -- we dread
Puzzling lack of videos,
Cancelled return flights.
Un-Googled country --
Dubious travel ratings,
Makes wimps of us all.
Currents turned awry,
Even pithy enterprise
Scares off investors.
Author's Note: These verses fit with SENRYU, a lesser-known variant of haiku that shares certain physical characteristics (nominally three non-rhyming lines, with a 7-5-7 pattern for the number of syllables in each line). Several of the other rules differ, and particularly, the topic of senryu deals most often in a humorous or satiric way with man's foibles. We have used this format personally for dozens of verses appearing recently on our blog "Daily Illustrated Nonsense", and remotely in a 2003 medical journal presentation entitled, "Seventeen haiku verses ... " You can read more about senryu HERE.
Moreover, we have developed palinku, a specific highly constrained form that marries senryu and English-language palindromes, as exemplified by some seventy verses that you can find on our blogsites.
Readers might also enjoy our illustrated poems "Hamlet at the pub", and "Hamlet's fardels" on this blog, and our earlier parody song-lyrics "The Play's A Sting" and "The Wreck of the Danish Royalty".
To be or not to be: that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
What we have above is the standard version of Hamlet's most famous monologue. Readers with a penchant for medical technology might also note the lesser known variant version,"SPECTiloquy" published in the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology. (Hurwitz, G.A., J Nucl Cardiol 2001:8:323).
"MIBI, or not MIBI. That is confusion. ... "
The variant poem dealt with the perplexity experienced by specialists, in an era of rapidly developing technology, in picking the best possible radioactive tracer, and the correlating imaging equipment, to assess blood flow to heart muscle at rest and stress in patients suspected of having disease-induced limitations in this vital function.
Difficult technical jargon in that poem includes:
SPECT: initialism for a type of 3D image acquisition using a rotating nuclear camera medicine camera
MIBI: initialism for the non-radioactive chemical portion of a radiotracer, that can be linked to technetium-99m, a readily available medical isotope and injected to lock in pictures of the blood flow to heart muscle at the time of injection.
The remainder of the poem can be followed, by folks who lack a subscription to that journal, by clicking HERE.
This piece was submitted to "Medium", November 2025.
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