THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 9th 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: Rainer Maria Rilke

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

9th April 2026

This week, we turn to Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” remains one of the great encounters between viewer and object in Western poetry. It begins in apparent absence: the statue is headless, incomplete, damaged. Yet the poem refuses to treat the torso as fragment alone. Instead, it radiates an inward force so intense that the speaker feels seen by what he is seeing.

That reversal matters to haibun. The strongest haibun do more than describe a place, object, or memory. They allow the encounter to act back on the speaker. Restraint does not weaken that charge. It sharpens it. Rilke’s famous last line, “You must change your life,” arrives not as moral instruction but as the unavoidable consequence of attention.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

. . .

for here there is no placet

hat does not see you. You must change your life.

Excerpt from Rilke, Rainer Maria.”Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell

Full text: Archaic Torso of Apollo | The Poetry Foundation

In response, I offer a haibun set not in a museum but in a curated spectacle of wealth and display. There, too, among hedges, fountains, and the noise of tourism, an ancient torso exerts its still regard. What remains of it is enough.

Still Regard: Hearst Castle

—Du mußt dein Leben ändern

by Billie Dee

A weathered statue, limbless, headless, groin chipped away, leans from a plinth hemmed in by manicured privet and low fountain spray. It seems out of place in this postcard garden.

The docent calls it “epic” as the tour group fans out, ringtones and selfies, scent of Tic-Tacs and sunscreen. Below us, the glare of the Pacific, piped-in church bells drifting up from the seaside resort town.

I linger behind. The ancient torso draws me in, a stranger’s presence against my own. That cracked sternum above a navel shallow as breath. That tilted stance, both of us heeding the distant thunder beyond the ridge.

heat-frayed

a bed of gardenias

open to bees

__________

*“You must change your life.” Rilke’s last line from “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

Frogpond 48.3, Autumn 2025.

Prompt

Write from an encounter with an object, ruin, or work of art that does more than invite description. Let it resist you. Let it alter the field of attention. Keep the prose restrained, then allow the haikai to open a parallel register of response rather than explanation.

 ***

Thank you, Billie, for being with us through this month. This prompt seems very interesting and challenging, too! Waiting to see how our members respond to it.

_Srinivas