THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 30th April 2026 Billie Dee - Guest Editor
- Srinivas Sambangi
- Apr 30
- 2 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Editors on haikuKATHA: Shalini Pattabiraman, Vidya Shankar, Firdaus Parvez and Kala Ramesh
Guest Editor: Billie Dee
Host: Srinivas Sambangi
Featured Poet: Emily Dickinson
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
30th April 2026
I have saved the most difficult poem for last.
Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –” remains one of the most unsettling poems in American literature. It speaks from a place at once still and lethal, possessed and possessing. The poem does not merely describe power. It inhabits the frightening condition of being both object and agent, instrument and voice.
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away –
. . .
For I have but the power to kill,
Without – the power to die –
Emily Dickinson, #764. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, R.W. Franklin (ed), Harvard Univ Press, 1999.
The full version of the Dickinson poem can be found at the following URL:
That pressure matters to haibun. The prose should not overstate what the poem itself keeps charged and unstable. It should approach the loaded pause before action, where inheritance, permission, danger, and identity are not yet separable. In response, I offer a haibun rooted in childhood initiation: a rifle, a father’s regard, and the first felt knowledge that agency can arrive hand in hand with violence.
Jackrabbit
-Billie Dee
quaking aspen
the dappled sway
of muttongrass
It's my tenth birthday and I’m learning to shoot the .22 rifle. It’s over 100 years old, handed down from father to son for three generations, and now to me. Even though I’m a girl, Daddy treats me like his worthy heir. “Act serious,” I whisper to myself, but I can’t quite contain my grin.
wild strawberries
gleam like pigeon-blood rubies . . .
stinging nettles
haikuKATHA #26, Dec 2023.
Prompt
Write a haibun that begins in a charged inheritance: a weapon, a permission, a warning, a role you did not entirely choose. Let the prose enter the moment before action, where danger and identity are still tangled together. You may write from memory, imagination, myth, or dream. The haikai need not explain the prose. Let it carry the wildness elsewhere.
***
Thank you, Billie, for providing thought-provoking and evocative haibun and prompts this month.
_Srinivas
#1
The Disarmament
I often see an American couple in Darbang Bazar during mid-eighties. There are no motor roads at the time. It is a small town where I study in its school. They live here for years. After our introduction, I come to know that he is doing an anthropological research on Thakalis for his doctorate degree in Columbia University of New York. It is my self-interest to befriend him, principally to learn English from them.
Among many things I see in his living room is a steel dagger. It is often kept in its finest leather sheath. It is certainly made in America. It really fascinates me. I wish to own it. I request him t…
Post #1
2.5.26
Face off
The Max Factor compact is too white— it suits my mother’s skin. On me, it turns my face grey.
Her fuchsia lipstick is very bright. I slowly twist the lipstick open and rub my finger over the tip to pick up some colour. ‘Snap’ the tip breaks and rolls down under the table.
I quickly rub off the chalky powder from my face before mom returns.
wind-blown clouds—
a dragon kite struggles
on a frayed string
Mona Bedi
India
Feedback appreciated:)
#2
The Lead Weight
the flywheel hums —
between silence
and the strike
The workshop held the smell of cold metal. On my first day, my father placed the composing stick in my hand. He adjusted my grip, then stepped back.
“Hold it steady.”
I stood before the open press. My thumb pressed against the edge. It didn’t move.
The machine waited.
the iron bite —
one letter
won’t lift
Jacek Margolak, Poland
Thank you Joanna
Subject to choice
No one knows . No one knows. But she knows a lot. Her retentive brain. Top of the class. How she had bragged and then confessed. Sin of pride. Worst of the lot. First they did Holst. Venus. Mars . There will always be rumours . Then they did Britten . A young person's guide. She knows what this is. Part of the brass. Bragging again. Not yet confessed. A. trumpet . A trumpet. The last. Last chance. And now there's a cloud . Cirrus. Cumungulonimbus . Yes. Top in thot too. He's up there now
who's she to judge
lowest mark in the class
R. E. not her thing