THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 23rd April 2026 Billie Dee - Guest Editor

Editors on haikuKATHA: Shalini Pattabiraman, Vidya Shankar, Firdaus Parvez and Kala Ramesh

Guest Editor: Billie Dee

Host: Srinivas Sambangi

Featured Poet: Robert Hass

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

23rd April 2026

This week, we turn to Robert Hass, whose poem “Heroic Simile” begins in spectacle but ends in uncertainty. Hass moves from Kurosawa to Homer, from cinematic death to imagined woodsmen, then to the limits of imagination itself. What remains is not action, but aftermath: the stillness a dying body leaves in the air, and the uneasy recognition that art can bring us close to suffering without fully translating it.                          . . . A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.

Robert Hass. “Heroic Simile,” Praise. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 1979.

Full text: Heroic Simile | The Poetry Foundation

That tension matters to haibun. English-language haibun often works in precisely that border zone between event and residue, image and afterimage, perception and what remains unresolved. The prose can circle a scene, memory, or encounter, but the strongest haibun do not force completion. In response, I offer a haibun that begins after a film, then turns away from criticism and toward something harder to name: the bodily memory of death itself.

The Stillness Left Behind

              —after Robert Hass

After the matinee, we step out into full sun. We’d just seen a samurai film—not classic Kurosawa, something cheaper. But it held one frame of truth: a dying man on a hillside, closing his eyes and letting go with such authenticity, it did not feel acted.

On the walk to our car, you mutter about the poor production and dubbing, the graininess of vintage black-and-white reels. But I’m not listening to you—only to that warrior’s sigh, to a wind that carries the scent of alfalfa into town.

Later that evening, I hike the arroyo alone. Not to ponder old films, or you—but to think about my mother’s death: the shudder in that last breath. The quiet that took her.

Pines on the ridge sway in the breeze.

twilight hush

a bobwhite’s call pierces,

then fades

Contemporary Haibun Online 21.2, August 2025.

Prompt

Write from an image in a poem, film, or other work of art that stays with you after the experience is over. Let the prose follow that afterimage into a more private chamber of memory or recognition. Resist summary. Let the haikai carry what remains when thought falls quiet.

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Thank you, Billie, for being with us through this month. The prompt is very interesting.

_Srinivas