re:Virals 540
Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Susan Yavaniski. This week’s poem, chosen by Orense Nicod was:
the box to check that I’m not a robot— winter rain —Cherie Hunter Day, Frogpond 42.1, 2019 (Museum of Haiku Literature Award)
Introducing this poem, Orense writes:
I chose this poem because I feel it resonates with last week’s poem by Ernest Wit in a number of ways. The phrase “the box to check / that I’m not a robot,” with its CAPTCHA language, comes straight out of a bureaucratic, algorithmic world where identity is reduced to verification rather than lived experience. The question it poses feels existentially violent, but also faintly humorous in its repetitive annoyance. The dash marks a clear turn. “Winter rain” brings us back into time, weather, and the body. It restores a form of consciousness that can’t be flattened into data.
I also read the poem as a quiet meta-commentary on kigo. Using such a deeply traditional, almost cliché seasonal reference immediately after a very contemporary form of identity verification carries its own humor. Kigo can sometimes feel like a box to check when writing a “traditional” haiku, a constraint that risks becoming automatic. This poem seems aware of that tension, yet it also shows how seasonal language regains its power when it is lived rather than used mechanically. The juxtaposition echoes fueki and ryūkō, the unchanging and ever-changing dimensions Bashō saw as essential to depth in haiku. What’s striking here is how much energy each part of the poem gains through their contrast and interaction.
The poem doesn’t argue for humanity. It enacts it. The reader moves from abstraction to sensation, from compliance to exposure. The rain doesn’t prove we’re human, but it reminds us what being human feels like.
Host comment (Susan Yavaniski):
This week’s haiku begins innocuously, hinting, like an unwrapped gift, at promise to come: the box to check. Lingering here, I think about the sorts of boxes I might check in the course of a day: the mailbox at the curb, for an expected letter; the nesting box in the backyard, for hatchlings; a box holding kittens, coming to their new home (the home itself yet another kind of box). Spaces of possibility, boxes begin empty, then fill, often with what we treasure, and always with what is significant.
that I’m not a robot takes me abruptly out of my quaint, twentieth-century reveries and reminds me what’s significant in the twenty-first. Not a three-dimensional box here, but a two-dimensional one, a window into our evolving Holocene, where the lines between human and machine are blurring: a Pandora’s box in fact.
The first two lines together describe the common, seemingly straightforward proposition we encounter daily: point, click, and affirm that “I am not a robot.” Yet in our brave new world, there is a chance—indeed a good chance—that human users at this juncture are being mimicked by bots. Ticking the box merely authorizes the Google security service (itself, ironically, a machine) to conduct its background check to verify that only legitimate humans proceed.
We can read the verse with the assumption that there is an “I”, a legitimate human being, the poet herself even, in it. We can envision her looking up from one box—the digital window of the electronic device—to another—a window framing the natural world—to watch the “winter rain,” perhaps finding in it a comforting, reassuring antidote to wearying “abstraction” and “compliance,” as Orense beautifully puts it.
But suppose we encountered this verse in a journal of SciFaiku, a context which would encourage speculation. Having recently read historian Yuval Harari*, I’m inclined to see the poem in a possible future, one in which homo deus—the technologically, biologically, digitally enhanced “human”—is on the ascendant, a future in which to be homo sapiens is to be on the wrong side of that Google security service. Checking the box might be to admit being an unenhanced entity, quaint, lesser even, maybe a danger to the new anthropological status quo. Such an affirmation might open a mere sapiens to discrimination or to more mortal threats. In such a context, winter rain would be an aptly dismal emotional locus for the verse.
I have no doubt that a very human Cherie wrote the poem, but allow me to play. How is a casual reader or an editor to know these days whether AI hasn’t penned a verse, even one as masterful as this? Is there a test that might distinguish? Should we bother to test? Does it matter? Is it ethical to discriminate human from “artificial” intelligence?
Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult film classic Blade Runner explores these questions. Its hero is tasked with the twofold job of tracking down rebellious “replicants”—slaves bioengineered to be “more human than human”—and then “retiring” them. The endeavor proves difficult, the tests to discriminate replicant beings from human beings ever more complex, the task of “retiring” them bloody, messy, and ultimately, a moral dilemma.
The action is set in a bleak, futuristic, climate-altered Los Angeles of 2019, in continuous winter downpours. As a kigo, “winter rain” (according to the AI) resonates with melancholy, suggests transition and uncertainty, speaks to the passing of events and of life. As a closing fragment to this week’s verse, “winter rain” speaks to me of our evolving climates—anthropological as well as meteorological—and of the uncertain future we homo sapiens face.
Urszula Marciniak:
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly advanced. How can we tell a human from a robot? Today’s method—pointing at stairs and pressing the “Check” button—will soon become insufficient.
Artificial intelligence writes beautiful poems and touching haiku. Almost every competition rule includes a clause appealing to the participants’ human integrity.
For now, we can still tell a bot from a human in a long phone call, but in six months, a year? (see editor’s footnote)
Will artificial intelligence distinguish winter rain from summer rain? Probably yes. Will it be wary of cold drops running down its cheeks and freezing underfoot, making us dread the next step? Probably not; its cheeks don’t feel the cold, and its feet, which aren’t even there, step confidently on any surface. However, it will beautifully explain the many types of rain, their advantages and disadvantages. It will surround us with an umbrella, preventing us from feeling the full force of the rain.
Before it’s too late, let’s dance in the rain with someone close to us. Let’s experience the atmosphere of the rainy season, even in a country where it doesn’t exist. Let’s lose ourselves in nature. Let’s fall into a puddle. Let’s stand in a muddy white jacket right before an important meeting. Let’s make mistakes that artificial intelligence can’t afford.
Let’s write a haiku about this, checking the box before sending it to the editor: “I am not a robot.”
Radhamani Sarma:
This week’s haiku touches upon the distinction between humans and non-humans, and invites us to consider the meaning of winter rain within this context.
Living as we do in a world of advanced technology, with machines taking on roles traditionally human, there is a chance of data being stolen, of identities misappropriated, of platforms faked, or websites attacked by malicious “bots.” To counteract the pervasive threat of these elusive machines, computer users are regularly asked to click a CAPTCHA box, to verify that we are authentic humans. Sometimes the test gets more involved and tricky, asking users to pass additional visual tests, which for many prove a challenge. At the very least, the process is an annoyance, testing a users skill and patience. The image of “winter rain” then, seems encapsulate the universal feeling of frustration these tests engender.
Sudha Devi Nayak:
At the outset, the haiku appears enigmatic, a riddle challenging thought. Haiku is a spare art form, but this one is sparer still, affirming humanness and being. The haikuist here is no robot, no artificial life form but is a living, breathing human entity who treasures her humanity. When we routinely check boxes that are designed to differentiate humans from animated bots and malicious programmes, we assert ourselves as human beings.
A robot is a mechanical device geared to do things as it is programmed, but human beings are a medley of emotions and feelings, subject to change and unpredictability. We love, we resent, we criticise, we forgive and ask to be forgiven and to earn our redemption.
Even as the poet checks the box for not being a robot, she is aware of the winter rain. Normally the rain increases the cold and can be unpleasant. But where winters are not cold, as in some states in India, the winter rain turns the landscape lush and green, buoying our spirits. Just as she experiences the winter rain, she would also enjoy the spring sunshine and a rose in bloom.
The point the poet perhaps is making is humanity’s growing thraldom to technology that does away with the precious sentiments and feelings we are capable of. Human beings are not robotic — they are representative of what makes life worth living and dying for. Yet when we see ourselves eternally scrolling, tinkering with devices looking for love in WhatsApp, and fulfilment in garnering “likes” that give us immediate satisfaction without lasting gratification, we become tired of the whole act and would like to return to our native selves.
Morgan Ophir:
A modern fragment and a nature kigo can often be a difficult thing to combine in haiku. The more traditional school of haiku eschews the subject — the “I” — entering the haiku. Putting Issa aside for a moment, the followers of Basho and even more so, of Buson, really avoid any mention of “I” in a haiku. And though I understand the arguments for this, I personally love Issa, in my opinion the Tristram Shandy of haiku, for his compassion, humanity and for his willingness to talk about the dirt under his fingernails.
In this haiku then we have the now very commonplace action of ticking the box on a computer screen to confirm that we are a real person. Everyone has done this. If one spends a lot of time online then it is an often daily task. And the kigo “winter rain”. So for me, as we have a subject, then the question is one of identity and place: “who is the subject and where are they?”
There is nothing accidental in a well-written haiku. L1 ends with the word “check”. Why is there a need to check? Surely we are human? We know that we are, right? L2 ends with “robot”. Again this is not accidental. The author uses the full fragment and the highlighting of these words by placing them at the end of each line to ask modern questions of self, identity, self in the technological world, reality versus “the Matrix” and AI, and to comment on modern life and the anonymity that one can feel in a world of computerisation, social media and “we are all connected” –ness. There are numerous conversations that can be developed from this fragment, of which I have only alluded to only a few. However, they do give us the very modern question of identity and the emotional state of the subject. That of existential angst, malaise, of “who am I?”
L3 is the kigo “winter rain” and at first it seems to have no relationship to the fragment. So what could the author be doing here? Perhaps the “winter rain” is also the emotional state of the subject of the haiku and the “place” of the haiku. For me it is a metaphor for depression, the robotic monotony of the subject’s life.
In addition, this kigo adds to the question “where” is the subject of this haiku? Perhaps the subject is at home on the computer, but equally they could be in a hospital bed on medication, filling in a form on a computer. Perhaps they are in a palliative care ward, answering a nurse’s questions. Perhaps they are in a coffee shop on their laptop, or at home on their laptop, binge-watching a TV series. “winter rain” has any number of possible places and emotional states that could be attributed to it.
The haiku very delicately touches on these subjects. The subject is present in the haiku, but does not shoulder us out with their voice. And nature is present, as well. There is room for all of us in this haiku as it raises universal questions of identity and our place in the world.
Lakshmi Iyer:
The em dash signifying the potential of the phrase after all the descriptions filled in fruitfully curiously satisfies the character of the narrator of how faithfully he succumbs to all the questions narrated.
Winter rain is an absolute treat to strengthen the haiku creating more awareness to all that, in spite of being so particular of everything; sometimes even less is beautiful!
What took me by surprise is the new beginnings of lives glued to the boxes of tidings well arranged and one can’t just avoid any of these. So much has been capitalised upon by AI and other forerunners in modern tech that questions as these just seem to puzzle us all the more.
“Am I robot or not” is not the question, but whether this really solves the ideology of the whole year summed up well by the systematic approach by the poet. I personally have this notion of just letting go these unavoidable questions and reaffirming our system. At the end of the year, it’s always how we calculate our approaches and energise them into positive vibes!
Thank you Cherie for this beautiful poem!
Ashoka Weerakkody—haunting us in cyberspace:
A modern-day haiku—almost a complaint about the way things are going—that seems to express the pervasive annoyance of the silently-suffering majority of otherwise good-natured, law-abiding folk.
The poet here is a peaceable explorer of cyberspace, who must confront yet another barricade after undoubtedly passing through an array of similar e-fashioned setbacks: user codes, passwords, ‘I agree’ compliance points, and cookies. On the verge of obtaining the proverbial boarding pass to the desired destination, this box prominently blocks the way.
It’s a situation familiar to all of us and one wonders why it has to happen this way. The preceding steps which took our cyber-explorer this far should, it seems, have been sufficient to recognise the user as human. But no, their humanness is challenged. That the mind would rebel with frustration is understandable. After all, one is only human.
The poet might have left this haiku as a phrase, ending with the prominent em-dash, so as to leave the reader in utter sympathy with our explorer, stopped at a roadblock:
“the box to check
that I am not a robot—”
The last line, “winter rain”, is, I confess, somewhat alien to me, living as I do just above the Equator, where I bathe in tropical sunshine from birth to death. The only experience I have of winter is that bit of cold which I have experienced in the higher elevations of the hill country, in tea gardens nourished by mist and cool fresh mountain air. Though I am inexperienced with real winter, I conventionally understand it as a snow-clad, sub-zero wonderland, and “winter rain” strikes me as a distortion of the season. I wonder, then, if “winter rain” here might be a reference to climate change, a sad deviation from the norm in the way these cyber-security checks are a deviation, and a precursor to the climate we are likely to inherit and share with the very non-humans haunting us in cyberspace.
Author Cherie Hunter Day:
We’ve all experienced this moment of having to verify that our responses are human, as opposed to something generated by AI. What could be more mechanical than checking a box on the computer screen? Dutifully we comply with those instructions, and in doing so we lose a bit of our autonomy, of our humanity. This is in direct contrast to the rain, which doesn’t need to verify its source. It falls freely. I wrote this poem when I lived in northern California, where the winter rains deliver most of the year’s supply of water. This deluge is vital as well as hazardous because of flooding. The rain doesn’t play by the rules and isn’t ticking a participation box.
Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Ashoka Weerakkody has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic. As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value. Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives. Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.
Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems.
Poem for commentary:
Show me the sutra In which the Buddha praises The colors of beer. — Barry Foy Haikuniverse, November 18, 2025
Bio:
Cherie Hunter Day has been publishing haiku since 1993. Her latest full-length collection is A House Meant Only for Summer: haibun & tanka prose (Red Moon Press, 2023). She now lives in New Hampshire where winter is a cold, snowy, and thrilling season.
Footnotes:
*In response to Urszula’s comment that “we can still tell a bot from a human in a long phone call,” this week’s host could not resist providing a link to one of many articles about “Daisy,” an AI bot grandmother developed to counter the scourge of telephone scammers. “Daisy” engaged fraudsters in conversations of up to 40 minutes long. See: ‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall.
* For more on homo deus, see Professor Yuval Harari’s book discussing the evolution of homo sapiens: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).
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