haibun

I’m happy to share another beautiful haibun written by Penny Harter today, the title poem from One Bowl, Penny’s first eBook, which won a 2011 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award.

In a recent interview at Female First, Penny said that One Bowl is a kind of sequel to Recycling Starlight (Mountains and Rivers Press, 2010), poems she’d written in the first 18 months following the death of her husband, renowned haiku scholar William J. Higginson. Penny feels the poems in One Bowl are “less raw and more contemplative, showing that time does heal.”

“One Bowl” took my breath away when I first read it — its unadorned language so pure and luminous, its message especially appropriate for this season of material excess. Knowing that this was written by a poet well acquainted with grief (Penny also lost both parents in the same year), I was also reminded that a loved one, one single person, can be a person’s entire universe. I like how she blends the temporal and the celestial, creating ever spiraling associations with the human heart at its core.

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Today I’m pleased to share a haibun by New Jersey poet Penny Harter, written just two months after she lost her husband Bill to cancer in 2008.

With tomorrow’s full moon and total lunar eclipse, an event ushering in winter’s cold and days when nights are at their longest and darkest, it seems especially fitting to reflect on how we process grief and loss.

For one who is grieving, the darkness seems interminable. What solace can a Long Night’s Moon, which remains in the sky all night and so high above the horizon, offer? Will the ritual of making a familiar soup bring comfort or revelation?

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