Hope
She stands at the front gate most weekday mornings, waiting. Those young ones sometimes come over to help her. She can’t remember when she last saw her own. She polishes one lens of her spectacles, making it blur more. A great smoky smudge. She shoves them higher on her head, pinning loose hair strands back, and looks down the street towards the college. There is someone walking on the opposite path, head down. ‘Hoy!’ she shouts and raises her arm to wave.
churchyard
a flock of pigeons
dissolves into mist
published Haibun Today November 2013
(A recollection from my time at Art College in Hope Street Liverpool UK 1975)
Prowl
The cat pulls me along on the lead, sometimes lying down on the cool path, but getting up if I sit. Following, I hold tight while he explores boundaries. He jumps at insects, probes at a gap in the palings where a blue tongue lizard has disappeared, sniffs for rats at the hole under a neighbour’s shed, climbs onto a mound of earth and paws at a tiny, narrow skull.
taut leash
the dew dappled web
dangles a fly
Lynette Arden
Published in Haibun Today 2014
Landscape
Am I wool?
Am I wool, easily squashed, but springs back, or am I felt, that retains the dimple?
Sometimes I think there are two of me, rather like a sheep with felt socks, hat and overcoat. When it rains my felt grows heavy, so heavy, and the dimples of the wet felt press into my wool, which fails to spring back, sodden as it is, in the dark under a wet, felt overcoat. There is nothing as heavy upon wool as a layer of wet felt. The skin under the wool shivers, the eyes in the wool covered face turn toward the least ray of sunshine that might part the storm clouds.
If the clouds part and the sun comes out, it may dry the felt. The wool may spring up and the skin warm and the sheep eyes seek out new viridian blades shooting up from the rich mud.
along the fence wire a sliver of light
Published in Haibun Today September 2019
Lynette Arden 