Haiku (Adam, before fall)

[matsunosuperfan]

Haiku

Adam, before fall
crawled out the first woman calling
himself a new man

[RiverNotch]

Even if there is dubiously a seasonal word (fall), the lack of a real volta makes this....not a haiku, but likely not a senryu either.

I'd also say that the weird insistence in following 5-7-5 in English haiku/senryu, when English prosody is so very different from Japanese prosody, makes this kinda awkward in its first line (missing a the).

Finally, I just don't find its interpretation particularly remarkable, especially as I'm reading both Milton's Paradise Lost and the apocryphal books of Moses, the Twelve Patriarchs, and Enoch. There's too much incongruity with the actual myths that it seems less like a reinterpretation and more like a lack of erudition, on the speaker's part, especially when the original myths already have a very rich psychology unto themselves, one that is very ripe to take straightforwardly while adding a progressive twist. Adam "calling himself a new man", for instance: God calls Adam man first, God has Adam in a passive, "feminine" position before the first woman was made---or else the myth itself is sort of schizophrenic, at once saying God made man and woman simultaneously (I think this is the Priestly redaction, but I'm not sure---the rabbis at least read of this myth as the creation of Lilith), then having woman be particularly subordinate by coming from man's side.