Tag: Haibun
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30.10: dVerse Haibun
A Samhain Haibun On Samhain night she lit a single candle in the kitchen window, the way her grandmother had taught her: a flame for the ones who still wander. The air smelled of apples and smoke; the world had gone thin at the edges, and she thought she heard the old woman’s tread across…
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2 Sept: dVerse Haibun
The Holding Breath To the 204 men and boys of the 1862 Hartley Colliery disaster — their breath drifts still, coal-dust caught in morning’s blacklung frost. They crawled into the narrow seams where lanterns barely held back the dark, where the air strangled itself thin. We remember the steel-to-stone rhythm of their pickaxes, the hunger-click…
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A Haibun to Darkness
Waiting for the Dark I sit by the window, the winter trees watching over me as daffodils push through soil and crocuses wait for tomorrow’s sun, and I write this, the light fading until gone, until the paper is more part of darkness than day, and I sit through the hour into night, alone by…
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15 Jan: Journal of Thoughts from Last Week
Fragments of a 10-Year Old I watched her kiss our waitress by the bins behind the Pancake House – they held each other like a secret, and that memory fell into this drop of ink along with flowers that eat meat and ravenous weeds that digest flies, and I remember that my father’s voice made…
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29 August: A Summer Funeral Pyre
That oak tree, the one when I looked up through its branches seemed to fill the sky in June, is now at August’s end. Leaves falling from limb and twig, its earthly-ways departing from their perfect place. Leaves the colour of a young girl’s brown eyes. Leaves blowing in through the open kitchen door, drifting…
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10 July: A Haibun for Sarah
For Sarah It was yesterday. I was in the garden looking at the roses, three-deep at the curve of the border, pink blossoms big as dinner plates, and the wind flowing in and out and whirling about, the clouds scraping blue off the sky, and I watched the roses fall into bruised quiethood, dropping their…
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9 April: NaPoWriMo
The Breath of Ghosts She much prefers tulips. They aren’t like roses or peonies that shrivel to dust and become the breath of ghosts. Tulips don’t wilt. They just drop their petals. They are like corseted Victorian women. They faint. And she knows that the stars she sees are already dead – but that doesn’t…
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16 January: Magpies, Crows, and a Heron
There’s a magpie walking around the garden with an apple core in its mouth – sounds like a wire of wind within its throat. Yesterday, there were two crows fighting over a bone bigger than they were long, both in moods like darkening sky. My neighbour has a fish pond, koi, I think they are,…
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10 September: A Haibun SOCS and RDP
The Water Back then, the village pond was for washing work horses. A few years ago someone put carp in there. And the pea soup came, a peculiar kind of dark downward vegetating mush and grass that pressed against the fish. It sucked the oxygen out the water. The carp floated to the surface like…
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31 August: A dVerse Ought Not Haibun
Ought Not I’m not sure about the year, but it was the summer that Mum painted the porch stairs emerald green. Greener than jade. And shiny enamel. I thought it looked like Amazon tree frog green. And she hung eight baskets of trailing fuchsias and forget-me-nots from the eaves off the back porch, as if,…
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