Bell, Crow, Moon: 11 Variations
Set of 11 haiku/waka variations on the theme ‘A struck gong. The crows launch from the trees. Behind them: the moon.’, written using LLMs.
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A struck gong resounds—
crows launch from winter branches;
the cold moon behind.Bronze bell’s lonely voice—
even the crows must depart.
Bright moon through the pines.Gong strikes the old pond—
crows ripple on night’s mirror.
And the deep, still moon.Bell’s mouth opens: crows.
Bell’s mouth closes: emptiness.
Moon speaks through the void.Bell transmutes the night:
silence becomes crows becomes
absence holding light.The bronze bell speaks once—
making silence into crows
and rushing dark wings;
what is left when they are gone?
Moonlight on winter branches.At the evening bell,
the crows shake loose their old roosts—
boughs left for the wind.
How long our sorrows linger…
the moon remains, still unchanged.Gong, crows, and motion—
all are waves on time’s surface.
The moon never moves.Surface: night, bell, wings.
Deeper: silence surrounds all.
Deepest: then the moon.Each crow carries off
a shard of time’s broken ice—
Moon needs no mirror.One strike disperses
what seemed eternal—crows flee.
Moon remains, fading.
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class="width-full invert-not">Colophon. What is this and where did it come from? The context here is that Quanticle asked me “what’s the vibes on Claude-4?” and I shot back “A struck gong. The crows launch from the trees. Behind them: the moon.” (vibes/gongs, crows/commenters, moon/Anthropic-capabilities (despite little PR like OpenAI), get it?), parodying the vibe coding Rick Rubin book.
And then I realized that was a neat idea for a waka! I spent a while messing with the LLMs to see if they could come up with variations I liked.
Which they did; and so I curated and cleaned them up, tested the LLMs’ critical judgment in pruning weaker or redundant entries and then rearranging the surviving variants into a pleasing order, generated some Midjourney/GPT-4o images for illustrations—and here we are.