The Oldest Game There Is 

In 1972, when the environmental movement was still in its infancy, the United Nations convened the world’s first international conference to raise awareness about threats to our global ecology. The official report of the Stockholm Conference included a passage that, today, reads like an ecospiritual creed:

Life holds to one central truth—that all matter and energy needed for life moves in great closed circles from which nothing escapes and to which only the driving fire of the sun is added. Life devours itself: everything that eats is itself eaten; every chemical that is made by life can be broken down by life; all the sunlight that can be used is used. Of all that there is on Earth, nothing is taken away by life, and nothing is added by life—but nearly everything is used by life, used and reused in thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains of plants and animals and back again to the beginning.

As human beings, it is easy to forget that we belong to that planetary equation, even though not one of us can stand apart from the matrix of biological blessings that the Earth bestows. Everything that eats is also eaten. It’s the oldest game there is, and everything is playing it. Even the turnip at the back of the cupboard.

Haiku often come at their subjects from a slant, and our Best of Season poem for Winter 2024 is no exception. The poet could have said that the turnip she forgot to cook has finally begun to rot, as its body is consumed by bacterial or fungal microbes. Instead, she notes that it “starts over again.” Can a turnip experience reincarnation? It depends on what we mean by that term.

Our anthropocentric frame of reference sees the value of a thing in terms of its usefulness to human beings. When something rots, it goes in the refuse bin. What happens to it after that is none of our concern. Most of us don’t even bother to compost. But its journey is not over.

Continuing through those “great closed circles” from which nothing escapes and to which nothing needs to be added, the turnip changes its form but does not vanish from the world. Nor is its utility lost simply because it is no longer suitable for human consumption. Something will eat it. And, in truth, everything will eat it eventually. That is how a planet works.

“Life holds to one central truth,” wrote the delegates to the Stockholm Conference. But it might have been more accurate to say that life holds that truth. That is what the poet is getting at in her masterfully understated haiku about the rotting vegetable. “All but forgotten” on its shelf at the back of her cupboard, the turnip is that truth.

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.