Photo by Olivier Ffrench.

First off, thanks to all of you who emailed, tweeted, commented, or otherwise submitted your Earth Day haiku to us.

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Now, to our dilemma: As we announced a little while ago, we’d hoped to pick a successor to our venerable “frog in boiling water” Official Grist Haiku — the one that concludes, “Dude, we are that frog” — in time for Earth Day.

We asked for your submissions. We picked some of the best, and we also seeded the entries with some of our own that we kicked around here.

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We figured we’d hold a vote, see what the popular will told us, and then present a “people’s choice” and an editorial selection — or, ideally, they’d be the same.

But the vote, as of Earth Day, turned out to be a tie. And the more we sat with this set of nominees, we realized that, much as we enjoyed them, we didn’t feel that any was truly suited to knock our frog off its perch.

So we’re sticking with him for a little while longer. Meanwhile, we’ll go back to the drawing board and see what else we can do to build irresistible momentum in the (intensely competitive) “humorous green haiku” market.

Or, to summarize:

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Grist Haiku contest
ends in dead heat. We’re stymied.
Frog, live on! (For now.)