Another Memorial Day arrives. The annual time to remember returns. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that in New York’s backyard, the third straight day of rain falls on the unofficial beginning of summer. This allows us to slow down, reflect, and remember. Frank Tassone, here, your host for today’s Haibun Monday, where we blend haiku and prose in Basho’s beloved hybrid. Today, let’s engage in remembrance.

Memorial Day is an American holiday that honors Armed Services members who made the ultimate sacrifice. However, it is also a good day of remembrance for all of us.

Is it someone we lost? An anniversary of some accomplishment? Or is it a simple thing that we remember? A day of remembrance allows us to preserve what matters, at least in our minds and hearts.

With my own education career drawing to a close, I certainly have a cause for remembrance!

Remembrance has certainly been on the mind of some poets:

Memorial Day for the War Dead

Yehuda Amichai

1924 – 2000

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now

the grief of all your losses to their grief,

even of a woman that has left you. Mix

sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,

which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning

on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,

in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.

“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

No use to weep inside and to scream outside.

Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up

as a little girl with flowers.

The streets are cordoned off with ropes,

for the marching together of the living and the dead.

Children with a grief not their own march slowly,

like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.

A dead soldier swims above little heads

with the swimming movements of the dead,

with the ancient error the dead have

about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.

A shopwindow is decorated with

dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.

And everything in three languages:

Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying

all through the night under the jasmine

tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street

like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.

“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

From Amen by Yehuda Amichai, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1977 Yehuda Amichai. Used by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

the sonnet-ballad

Gwendolyn Brooks

1917 – 2000

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

From “Appendix to The Anniad: leaves from a loose-leaf war diary” in Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harper © 1949 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Basho

1644 – 1694

Move, O tomb

 the sound of my weeping

is the wind of autumn

Tsuka mo ugoke / waga naku koe wa / aki no kaze

This Memorial Day, let us honor what we want to remember. Let our haibun sing our remembrance!

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 remembrance
• 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!