Haibun: Words Like Summer
Recently, my mother did something exactly like her mother: pointer finger raised, eyes wincing to a half earnest tone, yet set against enough sarcasm to land her joke. Astonished at the similarity, I was distracted from laughing. Her mother passed away last year. But, with her, her mother lives on in turned words, same jokes, same breath to voice ratio. My grandmother lives on just as my mother will live on through the gestures and phrases of me and my siblings.
Part of my astonishment was also at the ubiquity in what I saw: what I see as alive is just the coming together part in a cycle that also bends again towards drifting apart. So, when you or I say “life” and “summer,” we are lending voice to the moment of it coming together, or coming together enough for us label it that way. And to the other direction, you or I use words like “death” and “winter” as the moment when we can it came undone, yet somehow never as final as the labels suggest.
And so this morning, the calendar says after Labor Day, or “Fall” in our routines. But those are bandages we put on Summer, bandages that are loose and inappropriately big for how little Summer has come apart.
brown shredding palm bark
warmth just before dark: dusk’s glow.
summer’s loose gauze wrap
Part of my astonishment was also at the ubiquity in what I saw: what I see as alive is just the coming together part in a cycle that also bends again towards drifting apart. So, when you or I say “life” and “summer,” we are lending voice to the moment of it coming together, or coming together enough for us label it that way. And to the other direction, you or I use words like “death” and “winter” as the moment when we can it came undone, yet somehow never as final as the labels suggest.
And so this morning, the calendar says after Labor Day, or “Fall” in our routines. But those are bandages we put on Summer, bandages that are loose and inappropriately big for how little Summer has come apart.
brown shredding palm bark
warmth just before dark: dusk’s glow.
summer’s loose gauze wrap
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| & Haiku: Loose Bandages |
