Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

Antibes Journal II

UK Correspondent: Lynne Rees

8.

Bags of rubble accumulate at the side of the house. Half a dozen at first, then a dozen, then more that turn the corner of the house and are stacked along the roadside wall, until we run out of ground space and they’re piled on top of one another, and we stop counting. Sacs à gravats—thick, black plastic bags we bought at Castorama and heavy, white woven sacks the maçons brought with them—full of hollow clay bricks from the dividing walls we’ve knocked down, chunks of rock from the false windows we’ve opened up, broken floor tiles, wallpaper of every thickness and material and design, from every decade of the last century, metres of shattered wooden moulding, every length of old wire and stretch of iron pipe that ran through each of the four storeys. The flesh and bones of the house stripped out.

portraits of strangers
in the corner of the attic
someone else’s dust


9.

When we take out the fireplaces and their chimney breasts I keep hoping to find a reminder of the people who have lived here during the last hundred years: a coin, a shoe, something secreted away. There is only old iron, sooty terre cuite and stone. These are the things that held up their lives, not what they added to decorate it.

I examine the two framed pastel portraits signed by an Italian artist. The woman wears a blue dress; her face is flushed and smiling. The man is bearded, in a jacket, waistcoat and cravat. A watch glints from his pocket. What happened to them? Were they happy here? Were they kind to each other? Did he hold her and tell her that he loved her? The way Tony holds me and tells me not to worry?

10.

My soucis:

• the kitchen units will arrive and there will be no floor laid in the kitchen
  we will not have a bathroom by the time we move in
  the new windows will not fit
  we will fail the diagnostic test by Gaz de France
  we will run out of money
  the roof will leak

all the puddles
I step in
yesterday’s rain

11.

The maçons dig up the old tiles on the kitchen floor, hack away at the concrete screed beneath and come to damp sand.

When my parents moved into their house 51 years ago there was no garden, just sand pegged out with fence posts. Only dunes separated them from the sea, 200 yards away. My father brought in topsoil and turf. Over the years he dug in compost and manure. Today their garden flourishes with potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages, runner beans, soft fruit, but if you dig deep enough you still find the sand. The grains bury themselves in the quick of your nails.

12.

almost a ‘local’
the neighbour’s ginger cat
ignores me

The people who live at Le Grillon, another of the few original houses that remain in Avenue des Chênes, invite us for an aperitif on Saturday lunchtime in order to introduce us to some neighbours. ‘In France, an aperitif is always at midday,’ Madame tells me on the phone, and we make sure to appear by 12.10 at the latest.

Only two other neighbours are there and the six of us sit in a circle handing around a plate of thinly sliced brioche spread with liver paté. They tell us about:

• the unpleasant neighbours
  tourists parking right outside their gate
  the neighbour who shot himself in the foot trying to kill a rat
  
  

We tell them about:

• the walls we have knocked down
  the windows we have opened up
  the plans for our house-warming—la crémaillère—at the end of the year
  
  

Just before two o’clock there’s a noticeable shift downwards in the briskness of the conversation and our excuses to leave are quickly accepted.

13.

A week of sun and rain. The season hasn’t settled yet but there are lots of women, usually in pairs, who walk past the house to the beach in the late morning, and back up towards their apartment blocks at the end of the afternoon. They wear brightly coloured, long-sleeved beach tops made from some sort of voile that flutters around them in the breeze but still modestly covers their bottoms. Mostly they speak Dutch or Norwegian and I imagine a whole country of middle-aged, northern women living together at the top of the steep Sentier de la Vertu.

50th year
‘bikini line’ slips down
my list of things to do

14.

While I am scraping thick vinyl off the lounge walls, Tony takes a break from filling holes with colle universelle and plays the piano. The piano is the only piece of furniture in the house, the only piece we bought from the old proprietor, and, while it needs tuning, when Tony plays I can feel the house breathing, as if music is what it’s been waiting for. He plays the theme from ‘Love Story’.

When the movie first came out in the 70s my older sister went to see it with some friends and came home with tears streaming down her face. I laughed at her standing in the kitchen and sobbing but when I went to see it the following week I was the same wet wreck and cried for days afterwards. Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be… A girl who loved Mozart, the Beatles, and me… Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Song lyrics, script, cliché—but as vivid in my memory as any real experience. At thirteen, I had never imagined there could be such sadness, that life could be so unfair.

This is a love story too. A love story with a house that came to be ours through a whole string of coincidences. And here I am with my couteau à grattoir and my décolleuse standing on a stepladder scraping walls back to their original surfaces. And there is Tony closing the piano lid. And on the other side of the French doors the sun spatters the terrace through the leaves of the plane trees. And Tarek, one of the maçons, comes in and says, Madame, j’ai fini la cuisine. And here is our first floor laid. A blue tile, aged with ochre and cream, called La Douce France.

washing-up
the evening’s last shimmer
of sunlight

by Lynne Rees
Antibes France

Haiku Credits:
‘50th year’ was first published in ‘Planet, The Welsh Internationalist’, August 2007

Click here to read the first instalment of Antibes Journal.

Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

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Antibes Journal

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UK Correspondent: Lynne Rees

1.

55 years of marriage
my dad falls asleep
before we cut the cake

My mother has angina, osteoporosis and Raynaud’s Syndrome. On the telephone her voice sounds broken, but she doesn’t know why.

I am moving 1,000 miles away from my parents at a time in their life when they could need me more than ever.

My mother will die before my father. Even though he is almost deaf he will move around the house listening for her. Sometimes he will call her name, then wait.

2.

Moving house is no.5 on a list of stressful life events. I don’t think this includes moving to another country where you don’t speak the language and so many ordinary things you’ve taken for granted – making phone calls, getting house insurance or keys cut, knowing that the words you need to get through the day are already there, waiting for you to call on them – become small mountains to conquer, or at least to begin ascending.

top ten stress busters
smile
exercise
get enough rest and sleep
positive thinking
reach out to others
achieve a good work life balance
relaxation
eat a healthy diet
hugging
seek professional help

condensation
I draw myself
a happy face


3.

The light here continually surprises me. It illuminates ordinary things: edges of buildings, reflections in shop windows, my hands. This is what getting old means, I think, when I look at them. But maybe if I could magnify the skin I’d see the life I’ve lived filling every fissure and wrinkle. I have been lucky.

sunset
the golden belly
of a gull

4.

sun along the shore
even the grey cockle shells
surprise me

It has taken me thirty years to return to the sea. Here, on the Côte d’Azur, the water shifts through a palette of blues and greens, unlike the sea along the coast of South Wales, that steadfastly maintained its shade of gunmetal grey regardless of the season.

My parents still live in the house where I was born fifty years ago. When I go back, I return to the place where I took my first breath of salt-air.

5.

an egret’s feather
in the pages of my book –
a drift of snow

I remember the hard winter of ’63. I remember standing on the sofa staring out at the falling snow: Chrome Avenue, its pavements and gardens all hidden. But who is watching this little girl in the plaid pleated skirt with all her weight on her finger tips pressed onto the back of the sofa? If it was a true memory wouldn’t I only see the view through the window? How much of my past is invented, imagined?

The peaks of the Alpes Maritimes are still scattered with snow, while on the beach at the end of the road, people are pick-nicking, playing Frisbee, taking their first swims of the year. The bakery is now open every day of the week until the end of September. Each morning the pavement tables are full of baskets of croissants, white china coffee cups, women with small dogs, couples on holiday content to just sit and stare out to sea.

6.

The maçon has knocked a hole in the wall of the dressing room to make a second bathroom and the 1st floor landing is flooded with sunlight as it has never been since the house was built over a hundred years ago, and, from where I am at the top of the stairs, I can see through to the window at the other end of the room, out to the leafing plane trees, the rough trunk of the big palm. Plaster dust swirls in the air in front of me, to move forward I have to step over bags of rubble, past the shattered edges of brick, but none of this matters when light unexpectedly greets you.

our English neighbour
complains about the rats
wisteria in bloom


7.

Three sad and beautiful things:

a stray, pregnant cat at the autoroute rest area
the smell of the sea mixed with the smell of jasmine
the sound of the word echantillon.

insomnia
under the bed our sandals
press toe to toe

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by Lynne Rees

Antibes, France

haiku credits:
sunset was commended in the miniwords 2007 competition
sun along the shore was first published in The Heron’s Nest,December 2006
an egret’s feather was first published in haiku harvest, vol 6 no 1

WORTH SAYING: DAVID COBB ON HAIBUN

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in interview with Lynne Rees

nearby in the dark
someone calls someone else
using my name[1]

When David Cobb first moved to the small Essex village in the east of England where he still lives, the locals used to refer to him as ‘The Colonel’, convinced that someone who spoke foreign languages and made frequent, sometimes twice daily, trips to the village post box, not to mention trips to unheard-of countries ‘to do research’, had to be involved in something military and secretive. But there is nothing either military or secretive about David Cobb, a relaxed and rather shy man who is nevertheless happy to share his thoughts and ideas about haibun writing, although he self-effacingly says, “After 10 years struggling with and talking about haibun I’m not sure I have anything more that’s worth saying.”

It was in 1977, at the age of 51, “somewhere over Anchorage”, on his way to Japan for Longman Educational Publishers, that Cobb found an article about writing haiku in the in-flight magazine.

“My first attempts at writing them were little more than word photos,” he says, “and it would be another twenty years before Spring Journey would be published.”

Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, a book length haibun, or ‘nikki[2]’ as Cobb prefers to call it, was published in 1997 and established Cobb as the ‘initiator of the haibun in Britain’.[3] It was inspired by Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North but as Cobb saw no value in creating a pastiche he also sought out the works of British writers that might give him some ideas about the prose, among them Gilbert White, Edward Thomas’s The Icknield Way, R.L. Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage, and the collage haibun of his contemporary, Bill Wyatt. He encourages other haibun writers to do the same.

“Read the sort of people whose prose will inspire you,” he says, “not just other haibun writers”. Two of his own more recent inspirations have been WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison. “Although not in themselves good models of haibun prose, they gave me reassurance that haibun ‘has found its time’ in European letters.”

What other advice does he have?

“Concentrate on writing good haiku until you have confidence in your ability.”

no pencil—
my poem goes to Ladbrokes
to be jotted down[4]

“The haiku have to be important and necessary,” he says. “It shouldn’t be a case of ‘I’ve written a paragraph of prose and now I need a haiku.’”

In creating his own haibun he normally starts with the prose, and while he will often write haiku specifically for that piece, he will equally use previously written haiku that feel appropriate to the theme and subject matter.

“I believe that Basho did this too, so I’m with the angels on this.”

What does he see as the function of the haiku within a haibun?

“It’s crudely simplistic, but I suppose in the prose one might look for settings and actions, whereas the haiku are deeper into reflection. There’s also the visual impact they have on the page. Something we haven’t fully exploited yet, I think. In fact, some of Basho’s seem to go beyond ‘link and shift’ and act as punctuation, bringing an end to particular sections.”

In the Introduction to Table Turning[5] Cobb re-confirms his opinion that the haiku need to be ‘good in themselves and also perform a role within the haibun’ although he considers this desire for autonomous haiku as an ‘ideal’, a rule that can be relaxed occasionally rather then being written in stone.

“I’m humble enough to admit that it’s a very difficult thing to do” he says, “but I do believe that the haiku should retain a link and shift relationship to the prose, which should also have the capacity to stand alone too. But the essential thing, surely, is that neither prose nor poetry should upstage each other.”

He remains dubious about the often stated ‘rule’ that a haiku shouldn’t be easily capable of being ‘folded back’ into the prose. “There’s such a variety of prose that’s acceptable in haibun – clipped syntax, stream of consciousness, a more relaxed narrative voice – that almost any haiku could be written out as part of it!”

So how does he feel about the idea of the ‘haiku-less haibun’? Can such a thing exist?

“I haven’t seen one yet,” he says, “and it really seems illogical. After all, the one thing that distinguishes haibun from other kinds of short prose writing is the interplay between poem and prose. Take away the poem and what have you got?”

He draws a parallel with the debate around ‘one-word haiku’ – “It’s inconceivable such a haiku can contain a kireji.[6] – but admits that he’s less interested in philosophical discussions of this kind than with the literary merits of haiku and haibun and his responsibility as a writer to his audience.

While other writers might wish to stress the value of ‘process’, Cobb’s motivation is normally towards ‘product’ and the satisfaction of the reader.

“A reader wants to be entertained and/or informed. A reader wants a sense of fulfilment and enjoyment. As an author you have a profession and a responsibility to enable that to happen.”

But a lot of contemporary haibun are written from autobiographical or life material. How can haibun writers avoid the trap of self-indulgence when using their own personal experiences?

“Yes. I’ve read a lot of haibun that seem to me to be substitutes for a trip to Freud’s couch. A haibun writer must not be looking for some kind of therapy for him or herself, but keep an eye on the reader and what will not be wasting his or her time. Interest is all, to adapt a well-known phrase of Keats.”

sciatica—
I listen to the lark
flat out[7]

Self-indulgence is not an accusation that can be levelled against Cobb’s haibun that celebrate landscape, nature, literature, history and myth, and the characters that populate them. Their blend of story and poetry is close to his heart as someone who began by writing short stories, then shifted to haiku, and subsequently found the haibun form.

So where do his haibun come from?

“From things that have been sitting in my consciousness for years (memory), from things that are new to me (experience), and from my imagination. I used to look for things to write about – we all need the practice when we start out – but these days I wait for them to arise.”

And how does he go about creating them?

“Nowadays I compose on the computer screen, print off a copy and make corrections, then go back to the screen. After several drafts, and when I feel I’m in danger of losing the spontaneity, I’ll put it aside and let my subconscious carry on working on it.”

And how does he know when a haibun is finished?

“I’ll have any number of writing sessions to bring a haibun to a state of completion, but is any haibun every really finished?”

This question isn’t at all rhetorical. In 2006, Cobb revised his 1997 version of Spring Journey for inclusion in Business in Eden, a task he received some criticism for, but he defends his decision because, among other things, he wanted to correct an element of “unfairness” he’d displayed towards one of his characters.

By “unfairness” he doesn’t mean a lack of truthfulness but more a misjudgement, and he has definite ideas about the ideas of truth in relation to haibun.

“People who want factual truth [in haibun] are evaluating them in terms of philosophy rather than in terms of literature. We know that Basho’s account in The Narrow Road does not always conform to what really happened by comparing it to his companion Sora’s diary of the same journey. Sora’s diary was a faithful, or ‘true’ if you like, account. Basho took artistic liberties, selected and re-organised things to create art[8]. I view haibun as reorganised experience.”

Some people might be alarmed to know that Cobb’s own Spring Journey deviates in places from the factual truth. “But why should that matter, if the reader believes it?” he asks. “What matters in literature is emotional truth.”

‘Room’, a haibun from Business in Eden, is a sensual and playful account of how, during a Sicilian siesta, he is seduced by his hotel room, by ‘her cool breath’ on ‘a steamy afternoon’. ‘Withdrawing’, another haibun from the same book, places its narrator in a future society where voluntary euthanasia is a socially acceptable alternative to natural death, an obviously fictional scenario.

“’Withdrawing’ started as a short story,” he explains, “and was an exercise in seeing what a haibun might be able to achieve. Up until now, this totally fictional approach is a one off, and isn’t really representative of my work. But I still believe it has emotional truth.”

through a small circle
of paint-splashed glass
the open sea[9]

“It’s liberating to write haibun,” Cobb says. “Haiku, although they can sometimes arrive whole like a gift, even if they are open-ended and one may take liberties with the form, can feel claustrophobic in their making. There’s less constraint with prose, it’s more like setting out on an adventure.”

In 2005 this adventure was extended when Rich Youmans (USA) invited Cobb to collaborate with him and Ion Codrescu (Romania) on a project of linked haibun. Several of the haibun appeared in ‘Modern Haiku’[10] and apricot tree was subsequently published by Leap Press in 2006.

Cobb says, “To be in at the birth of a genre is somehow idyllic,” but he admits he was apprehensive about the endeavour at first. “Would there be some irksome loss of independence? Would artifice supplant integrity? And we didn’t even have the sketchiest plan that might help us produce a coherent literary work.”

But in fact, the lack of all but the most minimal prescriptions turned out to be an advantage, and he was delighted to experience a boost in creativity, writing things he might not otherwise have written, roaming “between actuality and fiction”, without ever feeling he was really compromising his cultural “differences” as a writer and lapsing into what he regards as “infertile” homogeneity.

apricot tree is an astonishing text. It opens with a stand-alone haiku by Codrescu followed by a short haibun written by Youmans in response. That haibun’s concluding haiku acts as ‘the link and shift’ for Cobb to continue. The reader then travels with these three writers through memory, experience, and imagination, across geographical boundaries and cultural perspectives, but never outside the domain of universal human experience.

Does he think that collaborative linked haibun have a promising future?

“[Rich was] a sensitive and discerning ‘manager’ [and] his instinct for picking writers who might collaborate in a positive way must have been crucial. I suggest that it would be unwise, as some person might be tempted to do, to ‘go one better’, to launch a grandiose open invitation to all and sundry to take part in a linked haibun. It would not be ‘one better’, it would risk the infant’s life before it had begun to toddle well. It would be good if ‘linked haibun’ could keep its innocence a healthy while before the rule-mongers set to work on it.”

And one final word about how he sees his own haibun?

“Nobuyuki Yuasa recently said to me[11], ‘What is important is that the author is absolutely true to his or her feeling. If he contrives to be fanciful or serious, he loses his genuine feeling. It might also be a good idea to be both fanciful and serious at the same time, because our feelings are usually mixed… it is clear to me that there is philosophy behind your comic descriptions. You only hint at your philosophy and do not preach it.’

“I would be very happy if my haibun achieved something like that.”

the journey goes on
I squeeze just that bit higher
up the toothpaste tube[12]


Notes

[1] from ‘a day in twilight’, Palm (2002)
[2] nikki: “By this I mean extended or serial haibun… Basho referred to Oku-no-hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) as michi no nikki.” Cobb, 28.1.08
[3] ‘Batting for Essex, England − and The World’ by Nigel Jenkins in ‘Planet – The Welsh Internationalist’, No 173 Oct/Nov 2005
[4] from The New Haiku, Snapshot Press 2002
[5] British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology 2005
[6] kireji – cutting word
[7] from The New Haiku, ibid
[8] “The writer seems more interested in giving us the… spiritual experience than in the prosaic recording of facts. This is expected of any literary journal.” Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, Kodansha International 1982, p.140.
[9] from ‘Second Course’, Business in Eden (2006)
[10] http://www.modernhaiku.org/issue36-1/haibun36-1.html
[11] from an email exchange with Nobuyuki Yuasa (Basho’s translator) about one of Cobb’s recent haibun, ‘A Walk with Issa (and the dog came too)’, Blithe Spirit, Vol 18 No 1, 2008
[12] from ‘deliverance’, Palm (2002)

Selected Bibliography:

Business in Eden, Equinox Press 2006
apricot tree, with Ion Codrescu and Rich Youmans, Leap Press 2006
Forefathers, Leap Press 2004
Palm, Equinox Press 2002
A Bowl of Sloes, Snapshot Press 2000
The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, Equinox Press 1997
Jumping from Kyomizu, Iron Press 1996

As editor:

Euro Haiku, Iron Press 2007
Table Turning, The British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology, BHS 2005
The Dead Poet’s Cabaret, Iron Press 2003
The British Museum Haiku, British Museum Press 2002
The Iron Book of British Haiku, Iron Press 1998

Website: http://www.davidcobb.co.uk/

Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

Thin but Rich

Correspondent: Lynne Rees

We’re a little thin on the ground when it comes to journals dedicated to haiku writing in the UK, but we’re lucky to have Presence, edited by Martin Lucas and published three times a year. It’s down to his insightful, editorial eye that a high standard of writing (haiku, senryu, tanka, linked verse, haibun, essays and reviews) is maintained. The amount of haibun published varies but there are usually between four and six in each issue.

In his most recent editorial (no. 34) Martin has specifically asked for submissions on the theme of ‘Climate Change’ but to avoid work that is politically ineffective and poetically disastrous he suggests that potential contributors write in response to a personal experience of climate change, adopting an oblique rather than a direct polemical approach.

Haibun on this theme should be submitted directly to Martin at: m.lucas27 (at) btinternet (dot) com

Other haibun, for the next and future issues, should be sent to the haibun editor, Fred Schofield, at: fredly24 (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk

The deadline is 31st March 2008.

Presence costs £4.50 ($10) for a single issue; £12 ($25) for three issues.

by Lynne Rees
Juan les Pins, France

Lynne Rees: ORDINARY WOMEN

Waiting in line at the supermarket checkout late at night, I find myself listening to a woman at the next till who’s just paid for her groceries. She smiles at the cashier and says, ‘thank you for all your help’, still smiling as she tucks her receipt and change into her purse. And the smile remains as she pushes her trolley towards the door.

She’s still with me while I drive home. Her pale blue coat, how her shoulders were a little hunched. And the way her eyes and cheeks, not only her lips, carried her smile, how it seemed rooted below her skin.

Today, I am still thinking about her. Thinking I should smile more. Thinking about softness.

winter sun
the shadow of a leaf touches
my shadow

by Lynne Rees

Kent, England

first published in Roadrunner, Feb. 2007

Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

Correspondent: Lynne Rees

A warm hello to all Haibun Today readers and many thanks to Jeffrey for offering me the opportunity to be UK Correspondent, although I hope no-one attaches any significant degree of expertise and knowledge to that title! I’m new to writing haibun, and haiku writing in general, having only stepped over from writing free-verse, and prose fiction and memoir in the middle of last year, but I have become quite obsessed with haibun as it brings together the two forms that I love the most – poetry and short prose. What I hope to do from time to time on this site is to share a number of things with you: publication outlets in the UK, as well as book and other news, and some of my own general musings on the form…

Today in this rural corner of Kent, in South East England, the frost in the farmyard is staying white and crisp in the December sunlight and the image is so striking I feel desperate to capture it in a haiku! For the moment, though, that image remains an image, and even if I’ve already found half a dozen ways to express it, it’s still only description, it has no meaning. As description it might charm a reader, but it won’t take them anywhere else, there won’t be that sense of ignition between my words and the reader’s imagination that enriches their experience, somehow, of their life, the world, the spark that encourages them to feel and think. Maybe I ask too much of haiku. Maybe I’m imposing myself too much. But ‘meaning’ is what matters to me when I read so I feel a responsibility to return that when I write.

When I say ‘meaning’ I’m not talking explicit lessons, long explanations, and banging a point home for the reader, but more the subtle meanings that arise from literature where language has been chosen with such care that it suggests ideas and themes, makes me consider the world and my relationship to it, helps me see things in a slightly different light. And that’s what I want to achieve in all my writing, whatever the form.

Bruce Ross [1] in his book How to Haiku, says, If a haiku is an insight into a moment of experience, a haibun is the story or narrative of how one came to have that experience. The words ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ suggest, traditionally, character development and some kind of ‘tension’ or ‘conflict’, and while character development is more or less self-explanatory, in that we expect some kind of change to take place, what about the terms ‘tension’ and ‘conflict’?

For me, these don’t necessarily signify spectacular, unusually dramatic events or crises, and I prefer to use the terms ‘connections’ and ‘disconnections’. All good ‘stories’, whether fictional or drawn from life, tend to work with physical, emotional, and/or psychological connections and disconnections (within the self, between characters, between characters and their environment, to name a few) and paying attention to these essential ingredients of prose writing in our haibun is one way to ensure we don’t just write beautiful, but potentially meaningless, description, that we engage our readers, ask them to be involved in ‘the life’ on the page.

Of course, as haibun writers we have an additional source of tension to exploit: the tension between the prose and the poetry. This is an area I’m researching at the moment in relation to the specific function of the haiku and their placing: how they can, amongst other things, work as a frame, or as intervals, or scene shifters, or reinforce a theme, or even, though I’m yet to manage it successfully, encapsulate another voice, in the way of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Lots of exciting possibilities. As w.f. owen, editor at Simply Haiku [2], says, in his definition of haibun, The haiku often is oblique, yet connected relevantly, to the narrative… a springboard toward new possibilities of meaning.

The haibun is a form that has so much potential for both writer and reader. I’m so pleased to be part of this online venture and look forward to the journey.

by Lynne Rees

Kent, England

[1] Bruce Ross, How to Haiku: a writer’s guide to haiku and related forms, Tuttle Publishing 2002

[2] Simply Haiku

Lynne Rees: TOUCHING STONE AT TRYFAN

We watch Terry climb the outcrop solo and rig up the belay station and safety ropes for the rest of us. When the call goes out for the first one, I step forward to be strapped into the harness before I lose my nerve. ‘Take your time and look for places for your hands and feet,’ he calls down. ‘You have to climb it your way, not mine.’ The first section is surprisingly easy – plenty of places in the smooth rock for my boots to get purchase, to push myself up with my legs, not pull myself up with my arms. ‘Women make better rock climbers,’ he’d said. ‘They can’t rely on their upper body strength so are more inventive with their routes.’ The sun warms the back of my neck, my head, the rock face that is only inches from my face. I can smell it: something like rain, the dark of my grand-father’s tool-shed. I pause – gorse and brambles in my way – look right, then left, to the space above me. And I see it – a tiny overhang just above that I can grip with my fingers then traverse, stretching out a foot and jamming it in the small crack to my right. I keep going, a slow measured ascent, finding my balance between rock and sky, the weight of one and the weightlessness of the other urging me on.

each moment
moves into the next
slow breath

by Lynne Rees

Kent, England, UK

first published in Blithe Spirit, V16, N3, September 2006

Lynne Rees: IN THE AIR

In memory of Lillian Crosse 1921-1998

sprinkling her ashes
on the rocks at low tide
the long walk back

Chairs are stubbornly empty of her – the wooden bench in the garden, the pine carver at the kitchen table, the small upholstered armchair that fitted her exactly, the curve of its sides mirroring the slope of her shoulders as she sat knitting, fingers tugging and twisting a length of wool.

But she’s in the air every time I smell smoke from menthol cigarettes that she tried to convince me would only smell of mint, in the whispers of her hand lotion that refuses to run out, the breath of wax in a tube of Rimmel lipstick I’ve worn to a raspberry stump. And this bar of nameless amber soap I keep beside the kitchen sink, torn between wanting to save it and loving the woody lather flowering in my hands.

break in the clouds
a shadow runs
across the lawn

by Lynne Rees

Kent, England, UK

first published in Planet, February 2007