When Frank at dVerse Poets Pub set us a Monday haibun challenge focused on the dystopic, the fiendishly futuristic, the foregone conclusion to life as we know it …

Or did he? Or was that just my interpretation, seen through the filter of other dVersers’ play?

i gave myself half an hour to scrawl, or in my case, to squrawl.

Reader, it was the editing and posting – as ever – that took the time, that delayed my breakfast, lunch, tea.

That made the fish rot in their polluted (plastic) basket….

Hi, Tech! I need the services of a Literary Executor as well as a Muse…

Squy-high and deeply 

Always introspective, they inhabit their own pain. Squirming like caterpillars trying to secure their chrysalises with spittle, they play with Greek plurals as a distraction 
from the quandaries, the squandaries, the obsessions, the compulsions.

Squirrelling away their savings against the uncertain, telescoping future. Squatting like toads on the dunghill of their imagined lineage, squittering the time that they have left in hurt and  harmful high-coo...


E'er writing haibun

weather eye on the future

grief, aye, on the past


The Muse squints at them: "If you had a choice between that stinking fish-basket and the lap of the Buddha, where would you lay your many heads?"

For - lost, wounded children - you still have a choice, still have a path, still have a body-refuge in which to ease and breathe, settle and rest. In which to dwell-all-the-days-of-your-life. Then choose loving-kindness!

Reach out into the community, open-heartedly, with curiosity, wonder, respect for the Wholly Others, becoming one and many with The Selves. Feast on your life!


When had that Covid -

jab in left arm, scarcely pain -

gazed in blossom's heart


© Kathy Labrum McVittie 19 November 2024