Horse Tale

 a wild horse

galloping toward me 

granddad’s fingers 

The mantle clock chimes as if it were an omen in a fairy tale. The opening notes of as slow waltz. Blue notes. How beautifully the mermaid dances on pain made out of daggers. How the tin soldier’s lead heart is heavy as ammunition. How the beanstalk winds toward heaven lithe as smoke from a smelter’s chimney. How I listen as my fingers gallop toward my granddaughter, off the table and on out the window. Outside the almost laughter of a kookaburra, the supernatural quardle of magpies and her answering the “h h h oo” welling from the hearts of the doves.

This haibun is from "Four Tellings" a trans-Tasman haibun sequence written by Owen Bullock, Beverley George, Jeffrey Harpeng and Joanna Preston. This collection treats haibun as links in a renga-like sequence. It has also been posted on Haibun Today where "Four Tellings" has also been reviewed by Patricia Prime.

Old Spark

Twenty k from somewhere no longer there,

at least, that is, not the place it once was,

in a garden a heart-fall from Eden,

a comely lass. Well, that’s one summation.

Her photo is peppered with age. With care

her image has outlived her. Now, moss

would smudge her name if any stone stood ten

decades, two wars, three regimes. Elation

 

and none of that, she’s a frayed thread. A glare

on the sodden mound behind her infers

at earth’s roll through space, a mill wheel grinding.

Face on a postcard, is grandfather there,

a bookmark, now unnamed  in old papers? 

He is just an old spark still igniting.

Box Brownie Sky

My father is on the roof and I am

sleeping in my cot. Just a hint of cloud

in the off-white sky. He is looking east

or north toward where he was, is, is not

My father is on the roof and i am

in some room awaiting a name: a cloud

of possibles. My name is to the east

or north. One word at a time. The whole lot

are in closed books. A corrugated roof

offers father as a word. His toolbox

explains. On a closer shed roof barbed-wire,

a hand-split timber fence below. The roof-

line has two words, father and his toolbox.

Overhead one cloud, and below barbed-wire.