Haiku for Healing – Haibun as a Healing Practice

Writing haibun to sample poems

Introduction

How does haibun facilitate healing concludes the Haiku for Healing (H4H) initiative of The Haiku Foundation. This is the second of the three-part feature which explores the potentials of haibun as a healing tool. You are invited to write haibun to the sample haibun prompts posted weekly. Starting Monday, Monday 19th October, a haibun prompt will be posted every Monday until Monday, 9th November.

Week 2

This sample haibun prompt is intended as a general guide to how the haibun poetic form can be harnessed to address difficult themes in our process of healing. If you’re new to haibun, consider a few points:

1. How do the three elements of a haibun – title, prose and accompanying haiku/senryu – work together to deepen the meaning of what you intend.

2. How the haiku/senryu doesn’t repeat what’s described in the prose.

3. How sparse language can effectively portray the scene, person, situation you want to write about. A few paragraphs rather than pages can still express a deeply felt moment.

4. You can use first-person singular, first-person plural or a third-person voice.

In the Comments box below, taking a cue from this week’s sample haibun, please post no more than two original, unpublished haibun on the theme of healing. You’re also welcome to leave a comment if you don’t post a haibun of your own.

When my father became prayer flags . . . *1

Through monsoon clouds a golden haze radiates in the west. Gamboge tendrils of bitter gourd vines flutter noiselessly in the breeze. In the courtyard of the ancestral house 108 prayer flags flap in unison. I murmur the mantra on the silken banners:

OM MANI PADME HUM

Invocation to Chen-re-zi, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, to negate my father’s bad karma and guide him through the bar-do.

Just a week ago, my father and I walked where the prayer flags now stand. A raven alights on the crown of a towering prayer flagpole. What does it see? Does it know where the dead go?

fog in the valley –
long creak of prayer wheels
into the night

Sonam Chhoki

Notes

*1. Frogpond, 33:1, Winter 2010

If you have any questions about Haiku for Healing, please use the Haiku for Healing contact form on our Contact page.

Coming up on Monday,  2nd November:  

Week 3 haibun writing prompt

Bio

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short-form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails.

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geethanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021. She organised a year-long email course in 2024 for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku for Parkinson’s project.

Read past Haiku for Healing posts here.

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