Good afternoon, poets! Frank Tassone here, and happy to host another Haibun Monday, where we merge poetic prose with haiku. Today, let’s address a phenomenon many of us have experienced: moving!

Job relocation, pursuit of opportunities, retirement, escape from trauma: many reasons exist to uproot ourselves from the place we call home and find another. Moving, itself, is a stressful act. What do we keep? What do we get rid of? How do we pack all of our personal property? What moving company do we call? Or do we call our brother-in-laws Joe and Luis?

How do we say goodbye to all the people whose lives we joined to our own?

Moving is on my mind, these days. After 19 years, we’ve sold our home, and will close this September. We will then move to a rented apartment across the Hudson River, beginning our process of simplifying. Obviously, I have mixed feelings about leaving the home where Mira and I raised our son. I grieve the loss of our backyard, and all the space—all the memories. Nevertheless, I look forward to simpler living, without ¾ of an acre of property to maintain, and of life in a more bustling, urban community.

Other Haijin have to things to say about moving:

On Moving

Jane Huffman

Like butter, gone. I’m moving on, because it would be ludicrous to stay. It feels like a return (to sanity), although I’ve never been. (I’ve never lived a mile west of Illinois.) “I come home from the soaring,” Rilke wrote in The Inner Sky, which I take as imperative (omit the “I”): to ground, return to Earth, to grind the fable of my life down like orpiment into a yellow ash and tie my body to the floor. Rilke writes of God (“still roaring in my ears”) but God, for me (today) is fear. Goodbye to my deteriorating house. Delirium. I’m out the door. Stasis is a sieve through which I drag myself. 

 Literature feels / far away. Black bulls grazing / beyond a pale hill.

Copyright © 2023 by Jane Huffman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

HOW I GOT HERE | Three haibūn

In the fall we moved to Seattle, so into our boxes went the table salt, the winter coats, the towels, and the wedding dishes.  Packing was painful, as packing always is, and the last glimpse of the apartment, newly emptied, wiped down, swept, was cut short by the neighbor’s niece: “You keeping that bath mat?”

Boxes piled in the bed of a red pickup

Miles of freeway winding through the hills

This city too will forget the nights

We spent wandering on University Avenue

Courtesy of Mia Ayumi Malhotra, LANTERN REVIEW BLOG Asian American Poetry Unbound

Today, let’s reflect on moving! Write a haibun that alludes to moving, any way you conceive of it.

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 is what you do:

  • Write a haibun that alludes to moving.
  • 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!