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THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 30th January 2025. Alice Wanderer, featured poet

Writer's picture: Shalini PattabiramanShalini Pattabiraman

hosts: Shalini Pattabiraman & Vidya Shankar

A Thursday Feature

30th January 2025


This month we have the pleasure of celebrating the work of Alice Wanderer


Alice Wanderer has been dabbling in haiku for decades but only became excited about haibun in 2018 or so after reading work produced by Kala Ramesh and her students on Facebook. Alice's book of translations of the haiku of Sugita Hisajo, Lips Licked Clean (Red Moon Press) won a Touchstone Award in 2021. Her first chapbook, Flow, deals with the rivers and beaches of her local place and indigenous dispossession. Her second, She Wants to See Birds and Flowers, will be appearing on the Snapshot Press website in the spring of 2025. 


Here's a haibun that won the BHS haibun contest.


Alice Wanderer

Fate Lines


On page 253 of Andrew Gordon’s A Modern History of Japan there’s a monochrome photograph, taken in 1961. Two hands, one cupped in the other, emerge from black shadows with the disembodied purity of a Brancusi head. But instead of polished marble, they are cracked clay.


No, not cracked clay. They are not cracked clay. But they do not look real. With palms twice as wide and fingers only half the length of mine, they are calloused and fissured. The hands of a twenty-one-year-old, “farm daughter”. 


Work hands, these palms would not be able to work without pain. She could not wash her face, caress herself or another or comfort the dying without pain.


To pray at a Shinto shrine – for a son, say, or a good harvest – you must clap your raised 

hands together twice. Even so, the crop may miserably fail.


potato famine –

orphan girls jostle to sight

the Southern Cross


 

Source: Blithe Spirit, Volume 34, Number 2


Alice shares, 'My writing journey started as a school child (perhaps 12 years old) when I found myself gripped with great excitement when asked to write an essay. From that time I would ever so often feel a burning desire to write something.


I think I love haibun for the flexibility it offers. I really enjoy reading other people’s haibun. I think haiku is a fascinating form of poetry. I like both observational haiku and haiku that works with paradox and surprise. I think link and shift is the vital element in all the haikai arts.


 

Prompt:


This week, we invite you to be inspired by a photograph of a place. Focus on not just the details or its historical context, its archtectural shape or size, but where and how this image kneads into your life and thinking at this point in time. Consider the threshold at which you enter or leave a specific place.



PLEASE NOTE:

1. Only two haibun per poet per prompt.

2. Share your best-polished pieces.

3. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written.

    Let it simmer for a while.

4. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse.

5. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.


We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished haibun (within 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in haikuKATHA monthly journal.


Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!


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113 comentários


mona bedi
mona bedi
03 de fev.

Post #1

3.2.2025


Mind Games


It’s called ‘Gray's Anatomy’. No, it’s not the medical series by the same name. It does not have Dr McDreamy. Instead it is a textbook of anatomy in which 1584 pages are full of pictures of the human body. I stop at the page showing a detailed picture of the human brain. It is not even 3 pounds in weight and yet is home to the varied thoughts of happiness, sorrow, self doubt, obsession and so many more.

As I stare at the picture for the umpteenth time, my daughter comes up and asks ”Mom, do the thoughts in the brain spill out? If yes, what would happen if they did?”

I just smile and…


Curtir
mona bedi
mona bedi
6 days ago
Respondendo a

Thanks!

Curtir

Kanjini Devi
Kanjini Devi
02 de fev.

#2 - 03/02/25


Duchenne Smile

 

I barely recognize the pair of eyes sparkling back at the camera.  The mango tree behind her is heavy with plump fruit and the spirit house beside her is smeared with fallen ash from three joss sticks. She has one leg nonchalantly crossed over the other, her bare feet smothered in dirt.  Her hands rest lightly on her top knee, and her upright posture reveals a strength that will surely stand in her stead.  The child's happiness leaping off this black and white photo is as palpable as my own heartbeat.

 

wishing well three coins tossed for the three realms


Kanjini Devi, NZ

feedback welcome 

Curtir
Lorraine Haig
6 days ago
Respondendo a

Yes, it's good to leave us guessing.

Curtir

alicewanderer
02 de fev.

I thought the haiku connected to the prose through 1 the shape of an eye and the shape of a boat are somewhat similar 2 the two boats are in conversation with one another 3 the conversation could be read as pleasant (the pats) or forced (they have been moored close together). “Magnetic pull” seems to be the key bridging phrase in the prose. The confrontation with the picture of the eye similarly allows for a range of possibly complex motivations.

Curtir
Kalyanee
Kalyanee
02 de fev.
Respondendo a

Thank you so much.

Curtir

alicewanderer
02 de fev.

Sense of the slamming shock of the tsunami and the stroke is so strong and starting in this Haibun. The smell of the sea and menacing crab also vivid!

Curtir
Lorraine Haig
02 de fev.
Respondendo a

Thank you Alice.

Curtir

Lorraine Haig
01 de fev.

#1

Fresh

 

One thousand kilometres from the earthquake epicenter, a metre of water flooded Hakodate’s fish market.

 

This morning it’s stacked with seafood, and we breathe the fresh scent of the ocean. There’s the chatter of people as they haggle a price. Fish of all sizes, octopuses, squid and crustaceans are kept alive behind glass. I aim my camera at you, my old friend, up to your elbows in thick yellow gloves and holding a huge crab. Your smile is more of a grimace.

 

We step around another one on its back, the drawcard for a vendor. He plays it like a wind-up toy. A gentle nudge with his foot and the crab peddles the light.

 


Curtir
Lorraine Haig
6 days ago
Respondendo a

Thanks so much Joanna.

Curtir
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