2024 Touchstone Award Winner for Individual Haibun – Roberta Beary

Roberta Beary is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun for 2024 for this haibun:

Grief:  The Uncut Version

childhood desk
i trace initials
no longer mine

Life is a scratchy film reel that plays in your head, your mother swanning into the solarium that overlooks the pool; life is her eyeing you from her loveseat perch, on her lap pink crocheted squares and the latest Dick Francis; life is you laughing when she says, Roberta, all kidding aside, you could stand to lose a few pounds maybe eat more salads, and even though you will sell the Florida condo, life is spending an hour looking at its staged photos, zooming in on what your mother calls the solarium and you call the sunroom just to hear her brusque correction; life is the warmth of the sun on your face as you curl up under her afghan no one else wants, while reading Dick Francis for the umpteenth time; life is letting the book fall from your hands as you close your eyes, a scratchy film reel playing in your head, your mother swanning into the sunroom solarium sunroom solarium sunroom.

10 years gone clouds shift a broken stairway

 

—Roberta Beary, MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 24

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Commentary from the Panel: 

Among many compelling themes explored by haibun poets, grief is surely one of the heavy hitters.

While these stories often reflect distinct practices and traditions, profound loss read through a haibun lens may also hint at universality, of shared human experience, including and perhaps surpassing specificities of culture, time, or place.

Of course, details do matter, and part of the innovative plunge offered by Grief: The Uncut Version relies on a reader being invited to dwell in the literal headspace of a particular poet mourning the loss of their mother. Through skillful use of repetition, sparse punctuation, and cinematic flashback, the poet shapes the narrative into the ruminating stuff of grief itself, not a story about those ruminations.

The prose content—snippets of remembered images, thoughts, dialogue heard and reheard—subtly morph across the span of the poem, just as they might shift across the arc of a lived experience. By the time the initial line of the prose reappears at the end of the paragraph, the order of repeated words is slightly altered, yet the scratchy film reel remains, still looping across an unfolding (and refolding) bereavement process. That each of these snippets opens with the phrase Life is serves as a poignant reminder of just how all-consuming that process can be.

The two haiku bracketing this churn also play a role in framing an intimate stream of consciousness as it evolves over time. The subtle mystery of the opening poem alludes to past identity now transformed, while the final monoku reminds us how the accommodation of loss matures at its own pace—in this case, a continuum of ten years, and counting.

Finally, the title Grief: The Uncut Version delivers a reader directly into a ferment of moments that, in turn, seem revelatory, wistful, and mundane. The whole piece resonates as unfiltered, the raw footage of a life indelibly altered. Call it a haibun peering into one person’s deeply internal landscape made unabashedly public and visible, loveseat and all.