Final Flower for the Day Celosia 11-4-2020

We had a big freeze several days ago so most everything is wilted. My last offering is celosia which is an ornamental plant in the Amaranth family. Celosia is from the Greek word for burning referring to the flamelike flower heads. It is also called wool flower, velvet flower and cockscomb. 

Celosia spicata has distinctive flower spikes.

Celosia cristata has a crested inflorescence much like a cockscomb.

It becomes a luxuriant velvet.

Celosia is an annual which re-seeds itself yearly.

HAIKU
"Before the Garden"

Cockscombs--
I'm sure there are at least
Fourteen or fifteen stalks.

Masaoka Shiki
trans. Donald Keene

According to Beichman:
The headnote of the poem indicates that Shiki was on the veranda looking out at the garden. The poem is a comment on the cockscombs-- he has tried to count them and this is his estimate.

Shiki wrote the poem at a haiku meeting attended by eighteen of his disciples on September 9, 1900.

And according to Keene:
...ignored by most professional haiku critics for years, [this haiku] is now often acclaimed as his masterpiece…

"Every masterpiece is a flower on a precipice to be picked only with spiritual danger. The risk is life itself. It is too much to hope every poetry-lover will unfailingly grasp all subtleties of the creative act, but no artistic masterpiece exists without the danger of its being misunderstood. It is a tremendous assertion for the poet to have said, 'There must be fourteen or fifteen stalks of cockscomb.'
' After we read this poem we cannot imagine the possibility there could have been more or fewer cockscomb than fourteen or fifteen."
[end of excerpt]

And finally Greve comments

In a recent documentary about the life of Shiki, I saw the cockscombs in his garden, a flower he liked very much. When he could not move around any more, his sister, who cared for him lovingly, planted the flowers a bit closer to the veranda. Later, when he had to be in bed all the time, she re-planted them again so that he could still see them when he uplifted his upper body, holding on to a crutch under his arm. Counting the blossoms was one of his daily joys in his sickbed.