Tag: haibun

May journal 1

Morning dawns misty grey again, the sky cool pearl. The meadow is speckled with the pink of orchids, buttercup yellow, and soon with the light will come the specks of blue-sky flax. The air is still but echoing with song, a throb from so many different throats, blackbirds, thrushes, chiff chaffs, nightingales, wood pigeons, golden orioles, and the hacking cough of lost pheasants.
Once again, the fox has taken the food container to play with, out of sight among the long grasses, and I am running out of boxes. I wonder if the pigs have been back, rootling in the ditch. There is nothing more to say, waiting for the sun to light the world of green and gold, the same wonder that never palls.

Minutes pass
in tree breath and subtly
everything changes.

Haibun for spring song

The dverse prompt is birdsong in a haibun. If you’d like to join in, this is the link.

The songs are short in the winter months, though the thrush thrills without a pause and the crisp air is loud with calls of crows and magpies, the chatter and clatter of woodpeckers and jays. But as the year turns the birds tune in. Great tits and warblers, chaffinches and robins, and though the mornings are for the thrush, the evenings swell with blackbirds’ song. Now that spring is full and sweet, the chorus is complete, loud and rippling, floods of notes, the nights are rocked with the cradle music of nightingales, mornings by the woodwind wake-up tones of orioles. And flickering to their own unmusical twitterings, swallows bank and weave in the first sun.
Wind in the leaves
water rippling over stones
magic in bird throats.

Haibun for the friend who never left

The NaPoWriMo prompt couldn’t be more appropriate.

My husband had a dream a few nights ago, more vivid than any dream he had ever had before. In the dream, he walked into the kitchen where I was preparing a meal. The children were in and out, talking. He stopped in surprise. Finbar was lying at my feet, long nose resting on his paws, his ears raised in recognition.
“I can see Finbar!”
I replied, “He’s always there, but only we can see him.”
“Not the children?”
I shook my head. “Only us.”
Husband crouched down and stroked him, and the touch ran through the dream and tingled in his waking fingers, the silky-smooth hair of his head and ears, the longer, coarser hair of his neck and flanks.
“He never left,” I said.

That same morning, I checked up on our application with the rescue association, for two friends that had touched our hearts, inseparable companions of misfortune. The reply was immediate. They’ll be on their way in the next few weeks. Finbar will have company soon.

Air is electric
in spring it buzzes with joy
even in sorrow.

Spring haibun

They were chopping plum trees down in an orchard by the river, all in full blossom. Disease perhaps, but the sight was shocking. Veiled in white, old trees falling, the orange wound of the stumps harsh against the black bark. Can such beauty be sick? In the distance, towards the flat silver band of the river, a tractor churned the brown earth. The sky was blue except for the dark circling of kites. Silent as death.
Spring unfurls green
winter white a memory
wind-tossed petals.

Haibun for an uneasy peace

I have been staying away from my computer, staying away from the social media with their words and images that inspire so much sadness and disgust. Writing fiction is hard too, unnecessary, perhaps even indecent, when real people in real places are suffering, and who will read it anyway?

Winter shrinks like words
once written forgotten
ditches running bright.

The sun is bright between the clouds, the wind brisk but not cold, and the buds are bursting. Daffodils are over but the first forget-me-nots are blinking blue, honeysuckle and plum blossom full of scent and the humming of bees. Alder leaves are opening and elder, the first vine leaves, and the birds are too busy nesting to come to the house after food.

Fox sniffs the air
the storm coming in grey clouds
will break the sky.

The strip of un-grassed clay around the house we call a garden needs weeding and pruning, proliferation dividing, repotting. It keeps my hands busy, my mind on tiny things. It stops me wondering what will happen to these tiny things if, when the unhinged minds blow, the profiteers move in, and the tiny things are ground to dust, indistinguishable from the dust of the great big things.

Spring sparks daffodil
yellow against the blue sky
we still fear nightfall.

Haibun for an uneasy spring

For the dverse prompt.

Last day of winter and last day of the hunting season is a day of wild sunlight and full of blackbirds singing, a heron low-flying and a flock of bramblings, the blue of muscari, white blossom and leafing trees. The cold glowering of winter’s mountain is bathed in gold except where it is bathed in fire and wreathed in smoke. I can’t see the glare through the peaceful trees or hear the clamour, but the heart knows the weeping.

No snow on these hills
only the fallen drifts
of wild plum blossom.

Haibun for a break in the clouds

They were around again, the overweight, middle-aged men in orange vests, with their dogs and their guns and their transport, posted all around the edge of our land. Their friends deep in the thicket drove out a couple of deer, and the heavy-bellied watchers shot them. I saw them fall, thirty yards from me, at the window watching, unable to to anything but cry. They hauled them away, the hinds, their gentle, dead heads, long-eared, scraping the ground, and I wished I had the power of the ancients to open the ground before their heavy, insensitive feet, and let the earth swallow them up.
An hour
of fitful sun before
the dark returns.

Haibun for a Sunday walk

We walked in the warm December sun beneath the blue and the scrawled runes of crow and woodpecker, the slow flap and glide of buzzard, and we noted how the turned slabs of clay were the same orange-brown as fallen oak leaves, and our boots trod the same track as deer and badger, fox and hare. Parallel, amical, their presence printed in the scented mud, they trotted with us a way, then one by one, they left to take their secret paths through the meadow grasses.

Walking in step
hand in hand we soar— kestrel’s
winter sun-glitter.