Diana Webb: LEPIDOTERISTS

From two fiddles and an accordian, the strains of Mallow Fling as the first thistle seeds drift out towards the folly on the hill. In search of butterflies, we follow the leader along the path where flowers of the wild carrot foam shoulder high as if the sea has parted.

a Comma sighted—
the line of walkers
pauses

He mentions different stategies for survival as experts dart from bushes on one side to grasses on the other. Look here. Look there! Common Browns and Marbled Whites and Silver Washed Fritillaries. With tiny cameras, one crouched above a leaf, one halfway up a slope. 'Enough. No More.' We head back down towards the garden party past Rosebay Willow Herb and Mallow flowers.

dash of citrus—
the longevity
of brimstones

.
by Diana Webb
London, England

Diana Webb: BERCEUSE

Notes of a piano piece by Faure wind a trail along overgrown pathways, through the french doors with their wood-framed windows, into the post war lounge. The wireless in the corner broadcasts the tune that heralds fifteen minutes for those too young to go to school. I sit in the light of early afternoons; a shimmer through syringa leaves, a fall of shadows down the rockery...

Little Bo Peep
Have you any wool . . .
for my scarf of dreams?

by Diana Webb
London, England

Diana Webb: NOT THE CHARITY SHOP

.

"The labyrinthine corridors of the Albert Hall...," says the radio voice, setting the scene for tonight's Prom concert.

I'm back through passages of time to when I, seven years old, in a white and turquoise damask frock my mother sewed, emerge from the tunnel when my turn comes, into the lines of boys and girls criss-crossing the arena, to drop with bows or curtseys, purses full of five whole pounds we've gathered, into cradles blue and pink respectively, before the royal person of the Queen's kid sister, Margaret.

a sparkling pack

of party princess wands—

thistle seeds

by Diana Webb
London, England

Diana Webb: TAXIDERMY

.

In a dark recess of the local museum, stuffed birds—bittern, heron in dusty glass cases—reminiscent of exhibits in the museum of my childhood, the big house in Broomfield Park through which Miss B. who once darted from a sum-filled blackboard to point out the first swift would lead us on our weekly nature walks. A stone's throw from the road where Stevie Smith lived and wrote of it, 'How sweet the birds of Avondale.'

found feather

between my fingers

splayed and smoothed

.

.

by Diana Webb

London, England

Diana Webb: A HOLIDAY (EDWARD H. POTTHAST)

.

Most paintings of such views are two thirds sky and one third sea, but this one fills the canvas almost to the measure near the top with damp sand, shallows, waves . . .

sifting through

a small girl's fingers

worlds

.

.

by Diana Webb

London, England

Diana Webb: GROUND

.

At the top of a twenty first century glass tower views all around and a window as far back as I can see: this 1940s 'Children's Paradise.’

To the east of the estuary afloat with swans, the promenade above the beach, sand rising to shingle, with its row of beach huts.

step by toddler step

the intimacy

of pebbles

Inland, beyond water meadows, on a hill over looking the riverside town, still inhabited by its ancient family, the castle.

dark corner—

most of my mother lost

just round the spiral

by Diana Webb

London, England

Diana Webb: A CALL

.

Someone on the end of a phone line 24/7. Open to visitors 10 a.m.–9 p.m. You don't have to be suicidal.

The nineteenth century building, base for the volunteer listening service, next door but one to a hostel for the homeless. Often an ambulance outside. Police cars.

early morning chirps
on the Samaritans' sill —
a house sparrow
.

On the doorstep a man crouched with a cup of tea. A woman in a see-through plastic raincoat, knitting.

by Diana Webb
London, England
first published in Quartet (Teneriffe, Qld.: Post Pressed, 2008)

WASHING JADE IN MUDDY WATER: BILL WYATT ON HAIBUN

an interview with Diana Webb

.

DW: Describe your life, Bill, before you discovered the world of Zen and haiku.

BW: Born 1942, the first of three kids, each of us born two years apart. My dad taking advantage on leave to father us during the latter part of the war. War babies they called our generation. I had a double hit of scarlet fever during infancy. As a consequence, I was a late developer and didn’t learn to read properly until around ten or eleven. I was fortunate to have a sympathetic teacher who helped me out in writing and art. I remember writing a couple of science fiction stories, my teacher encouraging me to make use of my imagination. But I have to confess that these school days didn’t mean a lot to me. But I did discover the works of Homer which opened up a whole new world for me.

DW: I understand that you became interested in Zen and haiku through reading Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in 1959 and started writing haiku that year. What in Kerouac attracted you?

BW: The thing about Kerouac was his concept of “spontaneous writing” and how, through his prose, I came across Buddhism and haiku, and that led me on to the works of Suzuki and Blyth. Kerouac was a big influence on me and my generation, especially his side-kicks, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen and Lew Welch, the original Dharma bums. As far as I am aware, Kerouac didn’t know of the haibun as a genre but many passages from his prose, for me, certainly fit that mode. In a recent Penguin Poets collection, Book of Sketches: 1952 – 1957, Kerouac writes “sketching . . . everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100 % personal honesty.” In those days, I doubt that he knew of Shiki’s “sketching” method.

DW: What was it that led you from an interest in Zen to becoming, in 1972, the first Zen monk ordained in England?

BW: Check out Summer Dreams: American Haibun and Haiga 3, for “The Early Days of Throssel Hole Priory,” which is a kind of hagiography and written in response to one of the monks who requested that I do a write up on those days.

DW: You went to the USA to train for the Soto Zen priesthood. On your return to England, you said you were hit by “apathy and complacency” and “imagined a situation in a near future when there would be only a few people left struggling with their vision and their poems." In what ways did writing haibun become part of that struggle and of your Zen life as a way of meditation?

BW: When I returned from Shasta Abbey, I was very much on a “high” from al that meditation. While there, I started writing poems in a surrealistic mode. There’s an old Zen saying that before you start, mountains are mountains, then mountains are no longer mountains, and finally mountains become once again mountains. So maybe I was in that second stage which the French surrealists describe as being “the marvelous.” Now and then, I slip into a surrealist haiku mode.

DW: In the BHS Haibun Anthology 2005, David Cobb refers to a style of haibun pioneered by Bill Wyatt, “an engaging patchwork quilt of classical and modern quotations and did-you-know information, in which the author is unobtrusive but pops up from time to time as the ‘link man’ or commentator.” An example of this type of haibun – “Spring Ephemerals,” written about 20 years ago – describes a journey you made to find scarce and rare Breckland wild plants and may have been one of the first haibun written by an Englishman. To what extent were you influenced by the style of Basho’s travel haibun in writing this?

BW: I've always been interested in botanizing, having fallen in love with the works of Andrew Young, 1885-1971, one of our most neglected poets and botanical explorer, and John Clare, 1793-1864, another inspiration through his poetry and natural history writings. I had a bunch of friends interested in bird watching and wild flowers and we would do trips here in England and on the continent. Rather than just make a list of our findings, I hit on the idea of writing up journals in the style of Basho and his predecessors. For the Japanese, this became an art form. They would visit sacred and historical places, making notes of what they observed, interspersed with haiku or tanka. The Greek lyric poets have always been an influence on my haiku, especially those fragments from Sappho. So, in many ways, I see that lyrical influence in my haiku.

DW: How do you think you have brought together the two influences of Basho and Kerouac in your work?

BW: Hopefully it's just the spontaneity. First thought, best thought (though we might have to go back and do a bit of tidying up!).

DW: Some of your haibun are about travels in Greece. How have you managed to incorporate both the world of Hellenic myth and the world of Basho in your haibun?

BW: My poems stem from the worlds of Herakleitos and Diogenes in Greece to Chuang Tzu and Han Shan in China. Basho, Issa and Buson encounter the cosmic fragments of Sappho and the Greek lyric poets. Bodhidharma has lunch with the cicada immortals. Sappho, with all the associations of the Japanese word sabi (loneliness), comes out of the past and tugs at my heart. The birds of the air and the flowers of the field – do they listen to our songs and paint us with colours?

DW: Some of the haibun written in the West now are very different from Basho’s Rucksack Dispatches and your own “Spring Ephemerals,” moving away from the chronicling of the simple life-style of the traveling Zen monk, with its celebrations of birds and flowers, to explorations of human relationships and the struggles within them. How do you feel about this development?

BW: Western haibun has to be an ongoing process. A lot of what I see appears to be something out of a creative writing course. No soul.

DW: In many of your own haibun, the haiku seem to play the crucial role of creating a recurring sense of the elusive spirit of Zen within nature, amid the day-to-day practicalities of traveling. What for you, Bill, marks the proper balance and relationship between haiku and prose in haibun?

BW: For me, haiku highlights the preceding prose, capturing that magical moment.

DW: What do you think will be the future direction of haibun in the West?

BW: From what I see, it could go anywhere, Maybe we need another name or definition. I stick with old Ezra Pound and let's “make it new.”

DW: Do you still feel as you did in the 70s that the future may hold a situation in which only a few people will be left struggling with their vision?

BW: Everybody should stick with their vision. But at the same time, realise that our visions change. I am no longer the person I was in the 70s. Next year, my vision could equally change. The only reality in life is change, but who's prepared to accept that.

Before I was born
washing jade in muddy water
I knew nothing else.

Diana Webb: HOLY WEEK

.

He tells me how a fellow patient used to call the walk to the room where they carried out electro-convulsive therapy, the Via Dolorosa. My friend is a pianist who moved out of the long stay hospital fifteen tears ago into this shared house in the community, also occupied at that time by an artist now deceased. On the wall opposite the piano one of that man's drawings. A mother and child hand in hand. Light plays on the tones of one of the many faces of a woman harrowed. Notes of a waltz.

.

asylum corridor –

a sudden window

blossom

by Diana Webb
London, England

Diana Webb: TURNER'S GOAL

.

A sunken blob of paint marks the centre of the football pitch, almost spot on where Turner created a watercolour of the old churchtower, west-facing on the brow of the hill, beyond trees in full leaf then as now, their varying shades - five black and white cows caught where the goal posts stand today, between here and the new hedge, obscuring the view he brushed in of the river's flow...

drawn
to the chalky curve
a dragonfly

A pair of maintenance lads in green wheel out a new layer from a plastic container; turning the corner, a chemical smell, some kind of weedkiller they say, burning it in.

coated grass blades –
re-ruling them
the wind

by Diana Webb

London, England

first published in Presence 34, Jan. 2008

Diana Webb: NOT THE BUTTERFLY HOUSE

.

'The Butterfly House closed last year,' someone tells us. So Beachyhead becomes the focus for this late spring day instead.

'It is returns you want, not singles?' the bus driver asks drily as we state our destination.

He drives us to a point high on the downs from where we walk to look down the precipitous drop to the red and white lighthouse far below, against chalk and spray.

on cliff edge posts
rose bunches bound tight ―
wind through the grasses

Outside the nearby pub-restaurant, under a cloudless sky, people talk of the hazards of full fat foods, cholesterol levels.

'Samaritans
are always there' ―
this small pink cranesbill

by Diana Webb

London, England

_________________________________________

Note: Beachyhead is a clifftop beauty spot on the south coast of England notorious for suicides. A Butterfly House is the equivalent of a greenhouse for butterflies in which exotic species breed, develop and live in conditions like those of their natural habitat.

Diana Webb: SAKE IN ENGLAND

'All in the April evening' ― 'By the banks of green willow'

Our chosen cherry tree the one most open to the blue evening sky, some flowers fully open, others budding. A patch of grass with daisies and a single dandelion.

'Under the blossom that hangs on the bough' ― Sake

We pour the wine into tiny cups. A jogger jogs by.

Small girl, reaching up to the pink blooms, dancing ― man in a wheelchair calling back his dog ― child, cerise-trousered, trotting on a pony ― man in the field, bare-chested, training a horse.

The jogger jogs back. We drain the wine.

alone
on a throw of petals ―
crow calls to crow

by Diana Webb

London, England

first published in Presence 33, Sept. 2007

Note: 'All in the April Evening,' a song by Hugh S Roberton,1874-1952. 'The Banks of Green Willow,' idyll by George Butterworth, 1885-1916 ( killed in World War 1).

Diana Webb: OUT OF SEPIA

A stiff photograph in sepia tones of a young Victorian woman in a dark high-necked dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, her hair upswept; my grandmother, a seafarer's daughter who lived with us when I was small and who carried me around downstairs all one night to soothe my feverish pain.

french windows ―
a flash
of knitting needles

Ocasionally someone called the Insurance Man came to the door about her funeral and she came down from her bedroom to give him money.

long wooden chest ―
clack of mottled shells,
bears' claws

Her room became mine when she went to live somewhere called The Woodside Home. Sometimes we visited her there. In a gloomy interior, old lady in a dark dress with white hair upswept.

smooth insides
of sweet chestnut cases ―
crunch of green spines

by Diana Webb

London, England

Diana Webb: TAKEAWAY

.
Waiting for a chow-mein ―
across the road
the last horse chestnut leaves
flap bedraggled,
a few buds gleam...

Always it seems I'm waiting ―
opposite
under the horse-chestnut,
a bollard in the bluebells...

'Chinese' coming soon ―
leaves turning,
odd ones blown free
flutter down the breeze...

....... Chow Mein ―
....... in the gutter
....... uncollected conkers

by Diana Webb

London, England

first published in Blithe Spirit, June 2006

Diana Webb: PERSON WITH A NOTEBOOK

I often sit in cafes watching people of the town go by. People with shopping trolleys, wheelchairs, kids in buggies, white sticks, dogs... I drink tea at a pavement table. A woman and two small girls tuck in at the one next door. I hear the words 'that lady'. The mother turns to me and says, "My daughter just said, 'that lady looks as if she's looking for mischief.'"

from afar,
his measured tap,
his eyes' twinkle

by Diana Webb

London, England

first published in Blithe Spirit, September 2007