Haibun: No Jacket Required

It was a cold night in Lakeland, Florida, when I walked around Lake Morton with some friends of mine. It was a religious school, so like all religious schools, we regulated each other with the shame that goes with so many rules and expectations.

This one particular night, as we walked, my friend Sean, who was wearing a jacket, suddenly wasn’t. When I asked what happened, he quietly slipped away from the group of us and gave it to a homeless man who didn’t have one. 

No hoopla and no stage, he did it because it was who he was and how he saw the world. In that fundamentalist world, his act altered us all.

thorns and winter’s

cold nights try to pierce

the bones