Lost: A Haibun
My mother used to say home is where the heart is. An attitude you have to take when you have moved so many times you forget where you are. Bright red rosebushes, venerate statue of Mary, slopes of cacti, school dumpster, garage refuge — strange assortment of collected mementos. A labyrinth mind castle that made sense of the world.
sagging striped swing set
knee high socks with sandals
dream forgotten door
The day we moved out, the rust brick walls crumbled and the octopus furnace bellowed in loneliness, a feared monster turned playmate. My map collection disintegrated in the exhaust of the paneled Pontiac station wagon, bursting at the seams with my belonging.
lost heart on the street
disappearing as I walk
into the between
But the roots of my heart held fast in the solid ground that I had stood on with my growing feet and sensitive skin. A blur of new faces, strange houses, school bells that never sounded the same, repeated over and over like a haunting dream. One door melted into the next.
running from sadness
with a broken down compass
roads leading nowhere
The shadows of childhood followed with me through 27 more melted doors into echoing empty halls. Somedays I pretend I am home. And somedays I wander in the yard of the only home I remember, sitting under the red rose bushes digging for my heart.
Yesterday I wrote a poem as an extra to the Tanka and apparently it was a premonition of today’s prompt because it is indeed a memory of my childhood. Put Grandmother’s Hotel as its own post and am sharing a Haibun here as well, a twofer!
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is “we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be”
Source: https://www.napowrimo.net/go/