Welcome to Haibun Monday folks ! If this is your first time to read about haibun, you can refer back to our past Haibun Monday articles so you are acquainted with the form. Here is short description of the form:
Haibun prose is composed of terse, descriptive paragraphs, written in the first person singular. The text unfolds in the present moment, as though the experience is occurring now rather than yesterday or some time ago. In keeping with the simplicity of the accompanying haiku, all excessive words should be pared down or deleted. Nothing must ever be overstated.
Our guest host for today is Jane or Lady Nyo. The theme is “Childhood Experiences”, whether they be pleasurable or traumatic, but perhaps something that changed the course of your life or impacted you in some unforgettable way. So share with us your memorable childhood years, and let’s get to know a little bit of each other’s background.
Please take note of the guidelines: (1) The haibun must be non-fiction (2) The occurance must have actually happened to you (3) You are to write one to two (or three) tight paragraphs and (4) End it with a season based haiku.
If you are new to dVerse or even if not, please:
– Write your haibun and link it to dVerse.
– Post it to Mr. Linky which is found at the bottom of this post. Please link your poem’s URL instead of your blog name.
– Visit each other, read, and comment on other writers. This is how we enjoy each other and grow our poetic community.
dVerse 
Welcome to Haibun Monday folks ~ Hope to read and learn more about you ~ Take a seat and have some warm tea & butter biscuits~ Jane will be coming in a bit ~
Warm tea.. would love that. It’s so dark right now.
Mid-afternoon here and snow is coming tonight ~ Tea coming up 🙂
Hello all and happy Monday. This is the first haibun of the year. If this is the first time writing haibun, just check out the description… look forward to read your poems.
Jane is here! LOL! Grace my email and your posting here crossed paths. Hello, troops! i’m new to haibun and I am having a bit of trouble typing for the bandaids on my left hand. Cat scratches all over. LOL! But I am here and anxious to read the haibuns posted. It’s a marvelous form and I hope there are many submitted today. Dig deep for those childhood experiences, pleasurable, funny or tragic. They all are grist for the poetry mill!
No worries, have it all sorted out in Mr. Linky!!!
And for the special surprise….here is a birthday cake for you dear Jane ~ Happy happy special day !!!!! (balloons all over the pub)
Yay… birthday greetings, and hope you will have a lot of visits to your wonderful haibun
Ah shucks! LOL! Thank you. It’s funny how things work out. I was reading Bjorn’s marvelous haibun and I saw through a big window out back a Red Tailed Hawk swoop down and land on one of my hens. My favorite one. Feathers all over and I am running outside in socks…and the damn dogs are afraid to come out of the laundry room! I’m armed with a mop…LOL! (which is probably why the dogs won’t come out..) and Hawk just flies into a low branch. Cheeky fellow. The hen is panting and has lost all sorts of feathers…I don’t know if she will survive. Hens have a delicate nervous system and shock takes them easily. She’s in the hen house and I’m crawling around the floor trying to see if she will survive, and I am cursing myself for not mucking out the henhouse floor this weekend. LOL! Knees covered in chicken crap. Not often I get to see a Hawk up close, but that was too close for me…and especially Whitey (hen). Talk about life and death experiences. Sorry for this tangent.
Jane, if you haven’t yet read Particularly Cats, by Doris Lessing, I highly recommend it. What you described above, you and your animals, is the subject of the book. You’d love it, I’m sure.
Tree limbs curl like strong fingers around the small frame. The river tears at a tire as it roars on – brown, with land, miles and miles from home. A muddy shirt flaps from a branch. Tin cans. A shoe. Angry grey clouds try escaping the mountains.
I am with my dad, in the truck, and he pulls off the road onto the gravel. It grinds under our tires. I feel it in my teeth. Not unpleasant, but not completely enjoyable. “Stay in the truck,” he yells back, disappearing over the steep bank, into the brush.
There are few cars, mostly trucks passing, throwing rooster tails of wet. My pants legs are damp. We have been saving what we can from my grandmother’s house. It was under water for days. So much was lost.
Bang. The tailgate falls, wakes me from drifting. Out the back window I watch my dad slide a bike into the truck bed. His hands have bits of bark, grit. Sodden grasses are caught in the teeth of sprocket and chain.
Whose freedom stolen,
became mine, by our furious nature,
cold November rains
Way out of practice, but I am on a snow day…and a couple exchanged emails with Bjorn and Grace got me wanting to play. (I know I broke the haiku rules!) Have a lovely evening everyone.
PS. Jane, thanks for checking on me not too long ago. Good to see you. Smiles.
Oh my god Brian…..!!!!! So good to see you in the pub!
And no you didn’t break the haiku ~ You are always good at story telling ..(I can hear the sounds)!
Thanks for visiting and wanting to play ~ You and Claudia are always welcomed here!
eh, fairly certain i tagged a few extra syllables in the mid-line there. ha.
it was fun, and read through some of the others. maybe i will catch some more later.
We don’t count strictly..ha..ha… Thanks for visiting too. Your other blog is still active by the way,ha ~
Maybe one day I will post again.
Not quite ready for that.
Smiles.
Feel free to drop by when you can, even to just say Hello or give us a kick of your words ~
Oh I love how you write, and your words are so welcome. Yore prose is just so wonderful, I swear I could hear the sound of that tailgate being opened… thank you wo much for coming to play.
Now is I could just get you to taste the tailgate, then I know I will have arrived as a writer. Ha. I remember a prompt Victoria did on Synesthesia, mixing the senses.
Good to see you friend.
Ah, Brian, you made my day! Always happy to see you, my friend.
So good to see you here Brian. You are most def missed.
You never know when a ghost in the machine might appear.
I hope you are well.
Brian, so good to read you! Been a while, friend. Hear you have had quite the adventures. Your haibun was wonderful….fell deeply into it, but I always do with your verse. I used to get mad at you (not really) because you always knew when I had posted a poem before…and tried to sneak it back again. LOL! you have a memory like an elephant! Hope you hang around more….have definitely missed you, dear friend.
I have a nose like an elephant too. Smiles.
Well, glad I do not make you mad any more.
And the adventure continues, I am returning
to Nepal this summer — and taking a team
of educators with me to help out at the school
where I taught. I really look forward to seeing
my friends over there again.
Sorely needed there, Brian. Kudos on you and your team. blessings, too. Need those. And no….you never made me really mad….you just ran around me and tripped me up! LOL!~ Have definitely missed you.
I always think of you as Ghost rather than Brian or Z…LOL. You never know
Loved this, Brian. You have so many stories. There are floods in Reno right now so this hits home. If you only join in on snow day, watch out. I’m praying for snow over there!
We are still trying to thaw out from the snow over the weekend. Yet another snow day tomorrow as many of the residential roads are still ice covered. I took a peak just now at the bridge poem prompt. Perhaps I will be inspired overnight and join in the comments again. There is a form called a bridge as well, I have written a few but its been years. We shall see.
😌
Happy birthday, Jane! And happy Haibun Monday to everyone.
Grey day here — I always call these kinds of days “make-your-own-sunshine” days 🙂 Looking forward to reading about all our folks’ childhood memories. Mine “popped” out last week — I’m sure you’ll see why. What I didn’t say was my folks both used to chain smoke in the car — and even with windows down, no wonder I always got car sick as a kid! But – that’s not the fond parts of those road trip vacations. We really did see the countryside in those days.
And oh how my dad loved his car. It was common for us to take Sunday drives — after church and lunch. He’d drive for hours — most times not to anywhere special. He was of the generation where a “man’s car was his castle.” 🙂
Tea and birthday cake at the pub today — yum! 🙂
Yes I can imagine why that memory popped up… smoking in a car that was something I just remember as a sickening smell left in taxis.
Well….it permeated my childhood, that’s for sure. But, in reality, I think in those days it was the thing to do. A common wedding present was a very fancy decorative ash tray! My mother had a beautiful, almost china one, in the shape of a tea rose. It didn’t look so nice with ashes and cigarette butts in it! 😦 And I had to always clean it! UGH>
Yep, Lillian…that was de rigor back then….smoking and those lovely ashtrays. and yes, hard to clean.
Well, I’ve done it.
Thanks for joining us Sarah!
Thank you Jane for taking a guest shot for me. Hopefully we will see more of you. Sorry to hear about Whitey and hope she makes it.
Thanks Toni for dropping by ~ Hope you are doing fine ~
LOL! Toni, Whitey is in my bedroom right now….again. LOL! She’s in a box with hay, water and feed. Sasha (cat) is sneezing from the cold weather and is ensconced in the quilts on our bed. Willow (crippled cat) is in his cage sleeping. Our house is an animal hospital once again. LOL! That Hawk got a lot of feathers out of her, but perhaps she will survive. Might bring into the quilts but Sasha probably will sneeze on her. LOL! More than glad, Toni to lend a hand, but haibun ain’;t haibun without you.
Happy New Year Grace ❤
Happy new year ZQ~ Thanks for dropping by and sharing a poem ~
Thanks for the opportunity
Yours was a terrifying story ~ Thanks for joining us Maureen ~
Thanks Grace
Happy Birthday, Jane, and thank you for being our guest hostess for the Haibun! I always enjoy our exchanges of thoughts and ideas…good to see you. xo
thank you, gayle. dverse is addictive and I have to watch it! I, too…always enjoy our exchanges….I feel like I have known you my whole life. Hugs to you!
Aw…very sweet, thank you! Hugs!
Happy New Year and happy birthday, Jane! What a way to start the year with eagle-swooping injuries! Poor little Whitey, hope she recovers from the shock. I have a great fondness for chicken and hens.
And how nice to have a brief glimpse of Brian too – always missed!
I was going to write a haibun about my grandmother, but somehow I got to musing about how I always used to be attracted to the wrong kind of people rather than the boring old safe ones, so it became something very different, more like a battle cry for change. Not sure just how well it fits the criteria, but hopefully tumbleweed is sort of seasonal – long, dry summers?
And… I did another one. Because once I’ve started thinking about these challenges I find it hard to stop.
Happy birthday Jane and thank you for hosting the haibun. I hope Whitey will survive! I have added my link and will swing by later for a read xxx
Whitey died over the night. Sad….she was a very sweet hen who didn’t deserve this. but…I buried her in my garden so perhaps she will add her sweetness to the tomatoes next summer. Such a lovely, friendly hen.
So sorry she crossed the rainbow bridge. Sweet dreams sweet Whitey xxx
Here on the west coast I am always late but I a glad to post a haibun I wrote awhile ago. So nice to see you Brian! Have missed your style ( and Claudia’s). Happy birthday, ladyno, and thanks for this prompt. I am sure it was a challenge to narrow memories down to just one or two for most of us. Happy New Year, if I didn’t say it before!
Good to see you too kathy. I am never too far away. Hope you are doing well.
Thanks, I am well. Oh, the haibun tastes of mud and grit… images of a strong father, boy learning life is scary and how to face it one day at a time!
Happy birthday, Jane, and thanks for hosting this Haibun Monday for us. It was wonderful reading all the things that “Childhood Experiences” inspired 🙂
Hi All…great idea for a prompt…my van broke down on the journey back to Scotland making last night a late one and today a garage day…back on the road again and just time to add a poem for this prompt…I’ll see if I can do the tues one too and catch up on some comments.
So happy to have you hosting, Jane–and here I am–a day late to wish you a happy birthday. Wonderful topic. I had to go waaay back.
LOL! Victoria…me, too! Waaaaay back! 56 years back. This was wonderful reading and giving comments to as many as I could so far…but exhausting. Perhaps this theme is so universal, that it was like a river. I am still trying to play catchup, and this will go on until Sunday? Hah! If I EVER am asked to host again, I will pick the tiniest, most obscure theme possible. LOL!