“found haiku” is from a news bulletin posted on the ATT home page for a few hours; I thought it a fitting epigram for someone at the center of a heated debate over whether or not life should be prolonged by heroic measures. I admire the way in which the simple act of dying becomes subversive in this news item. In political struggles, assassination, disappearance, or various forms of martyrdom fit into received categories with long historical precedents. Eluana Englaro’s death defies tradition. After a car accident at age 21, she was put on life support for 17 years before her father won a court battle in Italy to have her feeding tube removed.

Her father’s activism restored her the dignity of living and dying--a vegetative state is fundamentally neither. What struck me about the news bulletin is the succinct format in which life and death are conflated. I wanted to lend the resonance associated with the rather elliptical nature of haiku, so I cut the item into three lines. Although this poem is not a true haiku (it lacks lines of 5-7-5 syllables and is devoid of nature imagery), it is structured around a natural dichotomy: living and dying.