THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 31st July 2025. Lorraine Haig - Guest Poet
- Kala Ramesh
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
host: Rupa Anand
mentor: Lorraine Haig editors on haikuKATHA: Shalini Pattabiraman, Vidya Shankar, Firdaus Parvez and Kala Ramesh
Guest Poet: Lorraine Haig
A Thursday Feature
31st July 2025 - openHALL
THE HAIBUN GALLERY July 2025: Lorraine Haig
Prompt It's something we have never tried in this forum before - it's openHALL this week!
Let’s write about anything that you've always wanted to try out as a haibun, but something prevented you from stepping into those uncharted waters!
The field is yours!!
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Thank you a lot, Lorraine, for providing us with prompts for an entire month.
_kala
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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT NOTICE
NOTICE
Dear Haibuneers
Starting from March 2025, we at haikuKATHA are moving on to a new submissions format for haibun submissions. (Only for haibun, please note!)
Writers are invited to submit one unpublished haibun per submission window.
Kindly note the submissions calendar.
1-20 March, to be considered for publication in May
1-20 June, to be considered for publication in August
1-20 September, to be considered for publication in November
1-20 December, to be considered for publication in February
All accepted submissions will receive an email to confirm their acceptance by the 5th day of the publication month.
Your unpublished (only one) haibun should be sent to:
The Google link will be given in this space soon. This form will open only during the submission period.
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The Haibun Gallery continues as is.
We will be having editors and prompts, and your sharing…
Post #1
2.8.25
A castle in the sky
On a beautiful spring morning, I get up with a smile. I am nineteen and full of youth. A gentle breeze ruffles the curtains, carrying with it the sweet scent of lavender blooms. I pick a pink dress with tulle to go with my mood. Pairing it with pink ballerinas I step into the garden. Sunflowers smile at me. A yellow butterfly perches on my shoulder. Far away a cloud plays hide and seek with the sun. I run, twirl
and dance with the flowers.
“Have you dozed off nana?” my eight year old granddaughter asks tugging at my dupatta.
“No dear…I was visiting Alice’s Wonderland“ I say with a smile.
county…
#2
A Sonnet Postscript to an Accordion's Cantata
Dance Trio after Freddy Mercury: The crossed-out subtitle treatise on interruption glows in pink highliner on all modern scores. The second mouvement's calm, interrupting a brassy Broadway show-stopper and a bass baritone rapping non-stop each world-known lyric, is a ten minute void which retains a pure religious vision.
ancient manuscripts
unrestrained peace
before the first comet
Theme and Copacabana Variations: Tympanis outbang brass and wind exhaltation, a prélude to twelve seconds of silence before the prolonged cadenza: the only time the accordion plays. Whispers of a dancer's tango sway while harps and strings glissando and tremolo on high wires: the frisson that gives the concert hall reason to applaud my otherwise très avant-garde sound fest.
first…
Ferry Across The Mersey
Alan Summers
UK
Ferry Across The Mersey
If you are from Liverpool, England, you might be known as Liverpudlians, or Scousers. But I didn’t know the name Scousers derives from the Scandinavian lobscouse stew, popular throughout Northern Europe, and the port city of Liverpool of course. If someone talks Scouse in this city, it’s more likely to be the accent and dialect, as much as it’s about hot food.
frosting from danish to upper lip winter sun
It’s now cold waiting for the ferry, even though I’ve had a bacon butty and a mug of useful coffee from the Fab4 Café (aka The Beatles) from the Gerry Marsden Ferry Terminal ticket complex.
Now Gerry Marsden and the Pacemakers is also a pop…
#2
Moon Dive
blue jay feathers this ocean blue of falling
How did we become all of this. More separate than together. Buttons oddly sewn on a jacket. There is no seam to pull us back to whole.
silver raindrops already gone wishing well
These words that pass through air, already out of pitch with what we want to hear. There is no sheet to follow, no map, no instruction manual. Love is broken.
pine needles holding a green we long for
Home. The place we can no longer find within ourselves. Lost in a colour-wash world of parting. The moon blind shine of darkness.
Joanna Ashwell
UK
Feedback welcome
The Novelty of Novello
Dusk. A song plays out from a BBC radio station all over London.
'We'll gather lilacs'
In a Swiss Cottage apartment,she settles down to await a call as the last of the sunlight touches a painting on the wall.
scent wafts up
sound of the elevator
rising
'in the spring'
The nurse in the convalescent home at the south west edge of the M25 tucks her in with a smile of reassurance.
rest after hip job
a favourite footpath
beckons again
'down an English lane'
The American couple look out from their hotel window overlooking Hyde Park.
traffic thrum
postcards of thatched cottages
rustle in a bag
'to sing again'
From a high rise block she…