Good afternoon, poets! I am Frank J. Tassone, your host for another Haibun Monday, where we blend prose-poetry and haiku to write haibun. Today, let’s talk about an inevitable reality many of us would like to avoid and yet cannot: pressure!

Deadlines loom. Responsibilities mount. Time runs short. What do we feel? Pressure!

It is not just a human phenomenon, either. Layers of earth compress upon one another. Layers of atmospheric air enclose the earth. The oceanic depths contain the accumulated weight of an unfathomable mass of water. Again, pressure!

While neither humanity nor heaven-and-earth can escape pressure, its reality is not always negative. Without the pressure of weight and time, carbon would not yield fossil fuels or diamonds. Without the pressure of accumulated hydrogen and helium, stars could not be born. And without pressure, many of us would not come to realize our own strength and power in meeting its challenge.

Consider what other poets have to say:

Wave

David Keplinger

Lincoln, leaving Springfield, 1861,
         boards a train with a salute: but it is weak.
To correct it, he slides his hand away
         from his face as if waving, as if brushing
the snows of childhood from his eyes.

The train is coming east. In the window
         Lincoln watches his face. You’ll grow old
the moment you arrive, he says to this face.
         But you will never reach great age. The train
speeds like the cortical pressure wave

in the left lateral sinus, say, a bullet
         in the skull. Then he will have his salute.
Then they will love him. Then eternity will slow, fall
         like snow. Then the treaty with huge silence
which he, his face exhausted, must sign.

Copyright © 2013 by David Keplinger. Courtesy of Poets.org

from The Uses of the Body

Deborah Landau

Before you have kids,
you get a dog.

Then when you get a baby,
you wait for the dog to die.

When the dog dies,
it’s a relief.

When your babies aren’t babies,
you want a dog again.

The uses of the body,
you see where they end.

But we are only in the middle,
only mid-way.

The organs growing older in their plush pockets
ticking toward the wearing out.

We are here and soon won’t be
(despite the cozy bed stuffed dog pillows books clock).

The boy with his socks on and pajamas.
A series of accidental collisions.

Pressure in the chest. Everyone breathing
for now, in and out, all night.

These sad things, they have to be.
I go into the kitchen thinking to sweeten myself.

Boiled eggs won’t do a thing.
Oysters. Lysol. Peanut butter. Gin.

Big babyface, getting fed.
I am twenty. I am thirty. I am forty years old.

A friend said Listen,
you have to try to calm down.

Copyright © 2015 by Deborah Landau. Courtesy of Poets.org

Haibun for a Day in the Life of a Hikikomori by Jemma Leigh Roe

Exit signs hang above every door, but I do not obey them. The lavender walls of my bedroom, baby-soft, lull me into sanctuary. In the hallway, my mother leaves cold fruit and a letter. It tells me her childhood friend’s husband has become a billionaire. We cannot pay the electric bill. Under a lightless roof, I split ripe grapes and expose the flesh with impatient teeth. The seeds lie fallow in a sealed throat.

I fold myself in the sheets and speak with the deer skull my father once brought home. It whispers in his voice about a bullet’s kiss and the caress of a knife’s edge, glints of solace in a long dark. Hearing the hum of a lonely moon, I open my window and throw the head out into umber woods. Everything falls on it. Endless needles, endless snow. The fossil breaks more easily than I under the pressure of winter.

I, too, fall apart,
year after year, until spring
will awaken joy.

Courtesy of Okay Donkey Magazine

Today, let’s write a haibun that references pressure, in whatever way you experience or conceive of it. For those new to haibun, the form consists of one to a few paragraphs of prose—usually written in the present tense—that evoke an experience and are often non-fictional/autobiographical. They may be preceded or followed by one or more haiku—nature-based, using a seasonal image—that complement without directly repeating what the prose stated.

New to dVerse? Here’s what you do:

• Write a haibun that alludes to pressure.
• Post it on your personal site/blog
• Include a link back to dVerse in your post.
• Copy your link onto the Mr. Linky
• Remember to click the small checkbox about data protection.
• Read and comment on some of your fellow poets’ work.
• Like and leave a comment below if you choose to do so.
• Have fun!