THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 16th April 2026 Billie Dee - Guest Editor
- Srinivas Sambangi
- Apr 16
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 17
Editors on haikuKATHA: Shalini Pattabiraman, Vidya Shankar, Firdaus Parvez and Kala Ramesh
Guest Editor: Billie Dee
Host: Srinivas Sambangi
Featured Poet: Walt Whitman
Introduction
This five-part series explores haibun written in response to poems from the Western tradition. I think of this pairing as a kind of literary ekphrasis, not commentary, exactly, but entering a canonical field, listening, and answering back.
A Thursday Feature
16th April 2026
This week, we turn to Walt Whitman, whose poetry so often presses outward toward inclusion, embodiment, and the untidy largeness of the world. In section 32 of Song of Myself, Whitman pauses before animals, not to sentimentalize them, but to measure the human condition against their composure. They do not whine, repent, accumulate, or perform respectability. They simply are.
That contrast feels newly relevant to haibun. A great deal of contemporary life is clamor, opinion, and manufactured urgency. Haibun, at its best, offers another register: attention, scale, the body returned to weather, creatureliness, and the slow turn of the earth. Whitman’s poem reminds us that the nonhuman world can act not merely as backdrop, but as corrective.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
. . .
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
In response, I offer a haibun grounded not in transcendence, but in retreat from noise. The morning news blares its usual outrage; outside, a small order of creatures persists without commentary. Whitman’s animals are not idealized here. They are simply themselves, and that is enough.
I Stand and Look at Them Long and Long
—from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, #32
by Billie Dee
morning news
the same clamor and fury
as yesterday
I pull on my boots, step outside, and hike beyond the hen house, the leaky spigot and compost pile, to the old pine at the edge of our lot. Shutting out the static, I lean against rough bark, watch the measured reveal of banded iron ore as dawn breaks over the mountain.
A quail trailing chicks emerges from the thistle patch, her top-feather bobbing, delicate and precise. No polls, no opinions, no hype.Just hunger and caution. The slow turn of the Earth.
UPS truck
the neighbor’s geese
raise a ruckus
Modern Haiku 56.3, Autumn 2025
Prompt for Writers
Write from a moment when the nonhuman world recalibrates the human one. Let the prose begin in noise, agitation, or overload, then turn toward a creature, landscape, or small natural order that restores proportion. Resist idealizing. Let the haikai open a side-door into humor, friction, or further complication.
***
Thank you, Billie, for being with us through this month. Waiting to see how our members respond to this challenging prompt.
_Srinivas
#1
Why Does a Man commit Crimes?
A junction of half dozen buildings including mine. One night, I spot a brown dog (I couldn't tell its breed), sitting on the sidewalk--- an ideal location for him to get human's attention, primarily foods. In fact, he is sitting right on the cement slab of the sidewalk on which my mother and other neighbors put their waste foods for the birds.
My landlady shares her theory that he gets sick, and due to the fear of contracting his illness, his owner abandons him here.
CC camera
installed a building
the dog’s quietness
Tejendra Sherchan, Nepal
#1
A Head Full of Noise
All night the wind is gale force. The roof shakes. Sleeping is impossible. In the early hours with a pulse of one hundred and twenty, I plod downstairs to make tea. It’s quieter down here.
The moon is in the western sky. It’s late Autumn. The time when pademelons are active and breeding. There’s one outside the window foraging among the plants. I sip my tea watching a joey. It’s been ejected from the pouch and replaced by a newborn. There’s not room for both.
first school day
the child follows
his mother home
Lorraine Haig, Aust.
#2
Between Announcements
The station swells with noise—announcements cracking, vendors insisting on tea as if it might summon the train. My bag cuts into my shoulder while the board blinks another delay. A child drags a stubborn suitcase, wheels protesting every inch. Phones glow, tempers rise, time stretches without moving. I stand there, held in place by everything that won’t arrive.
sunlit wall— stopping halfway a lizard darts on
Sathya Venkatesh, India
#2
Zeroing Out
The notification light on the phone blinks like a fever. Emails, missed calls — a thousand urgent demands that will be forgotten by noon. I step into the yard, the noise still tightening behind my eyes.
Near a rusted winch, a spider has anchored its web between stacked steel plates and a dead mullein stalk. It sits at the center. The threads hold.
The highway hum passes through. I stand there until my pulse slows.
fresh coffee —
a drop of oil
on the dark surface
Jacek Margolak, Poland
#2
The Point of It
I stop and refocus, this seems so out of place in the park. I’ve admired the trees, the river, the flowers and now this. The birdsong has ceased. Fingers sticking up from the cement, a whole hand rising to point skyward. I go closer, and study the bleached stone.
circling the thumb
a pigeon lands
to poop on a finger
Joanna Ashwell
UK