Haibun: Just Like Walt Whitman
Autumn in the sunshine, relaxing and as a lazy summer day… except when juxtaposed to what our sisters and brothers face as citizens of Yemen. The mothers and fathers confined to Yemen are left to bury their babies as the only way to forget their permeant hunger. Walking skeletons resigned to starvation. That is what it means to be a person in Yemen.
So what about Autumn and nature and the normal & Haiku haibun stuff, is & Haiku now a geo political page? Not at all, I raise the atrocities of Yemen because it’s part of reality. We escape into nature so we can look at reality and reflect on reality, not to run from war forced genocide. For me, the goal in jumping fully into the natural world is to see how small I am in such a big and beautiful world, a world I need more than needs me. My prayer is to breathe a humbling reality from climbing a mountain that can break me with one rolled boulder. Being vulnerable to a benevolent ecosystem makes me small, but it makes the evils of a militarized planet seem smaller too. This is something Walt Whitman did and he made beautiful and timeless poems from it. We would all be better if we were honest like Walt Whitman.
But when we use the natural world as a selfie prop or a way of ignoring the reality of who we are and this world we helped create, the natural world becomes the victim of our collective, cannibalizing greed. We lose our smallness to a world we think can fit onto a screen, so we lose the battles of good and solving climate change and ending genocide and imperialism, all because these problems seem bigger than us and bigger than the world around us, all because we lose how small and vulnerable we are in such a vast and loving universe. When we shrink, our problems shrink proportionately, and the universe grows in size and love. Read Walt Whitman and see what I mean.
lapping, shoreline blops,
of monsoon raindrops, back. forth.
autumn and more sun
So what about Autumn and nature and the normal & Haiku haibun stuff, is & Haiku now a geo political page? Not at all, I raise the atrocities of Yemen because it’s part of reality. We escape into nature so we can look at reality and reflect on reality, not to run from war forced genocide. For me, the goal in jumping fully into the natural world is to see how small I am in such a big and beautiful world, a world I need more than needs me. My prayer is to breathe a humbling reality from climbing a mountain that can break me with one rolled boulder. Being vulnerable to a benevolent ecosystem makes me small, but it makes the evils of a militarized planet seem smaller too. This is something Walt Whitman did and he made beautiful and timeless poems from it. We would all be better if we were honest like Walt Whitman.
But when we use the natural world as a selfie prop or a way of ignoring the reality of who we are and this world we helped create, the natural world becomes the victim of our collective, cannibalizing greed. We lose our smallness to a world we think can fit onto a screen, so we lose the battles of good and solving climate change and ending genocide and imperialism, all because these problems seem bigger than us and bigger than the world around us, all because we lose how small and vulnerable we are in such a vast and loving universe. When we shrink, our problems shrink proportionately, and the universe grows in size and love. Read Walt Whitman and see what I mean.
lapping, shoreline blops,
of monsoon raindrops, back. forth.
autumn and more sun
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| & Haiku: Monsoon Raindrops |
