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 4

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In the Comments box below, taking a cue from this week’s sample haibun, please post no more than two original, unpublished haibun on the theme of healing.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.

A Door Left Ajar . . . *1

There’s a tremor in Bida’s voice on the phone. I know immediately there has been another incident. “I’ll be on the first bus,” she says.

Bida is a neighbour in my ancestral village, married to a retired teacher, who has drunken bouts. She frequently comes to stay at my place, following what I imagine, are fierce and violent quarrels with her husband. She once arrived with a deep gash on a markedly swollen right arm and at the city hospital maintained she had injured herself while cutting wood.

The thought of seeking help doesn’t appeal to her. “You don’t have to put up with him.” I plead. All she divulges is a heartfelt, “I haven’t told him where I am. Let’s see how he manages without me.” Sometimes, it is a passionate outcry, “He is so selfish!”

My attempts to talk about her husband are fielded with breath-taking adroitness. “You need a new altar cloth,” she announces removing the offering bowls and butter lamps and proceeding to dust and polish the cabinets and drawers. Ignoring my embarrassment at her generosity, she spreads out a richly embroidered raw silk piece and says, “I made it for this altar.”

I observe her quietly. She is in stitches when my daughter shows her memes on the smart phone and poses for Selfies with aplomb. To my surprise, Bida faces no objection when she chides my daughter for throwing her washed and unwashed clothes in an indistinguishable heap on the floor of her room. With calm determination Bida resolves my misgivings about what she will do while we are at work and my daughter is at school. Over the course of her sojourn, she finds curtains to mend, tends to my meagre collection of plants in the garden and without any flourish prepares mouth-watering dishes with ingredients conjured out of her large cloth bag – smoked tamarillos, chanterelle, morel, Sichuan pepper and yak cheese. The aroma fills every nook and cranny of the house.

“She does know, doesn’t she, that we can get food here in the shops?” my husband jokes. I watch in amazement as he later eats his words relishing the various delicious preparations Bida makes.

I have learned not to suggest trips to the shopping mall or eating out of an evening. But Bida has a certain weakness for Korean soap operas. She often makes a large bowl of steamed soya beans sprinkled with chili flakes and coarse salt and settles down to the latest episodes. I treat her to a video of Train to Busan, which both enthrals and appalls her in equal measure. “Look how clean and swift their trains are!” she exclaims. Willing the protagonist and his young daughter to outwit the zombies she intones, “Oṃ Āḥ Hūṃ Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hūṃ,” the Padma-sambhava mantra. Her eyes light up when my husband brings tubs of her favourite ice cream – chocolate mint and pistachio.

She announces her departure casually, “He called. I am leaving tomorrow on the first bus.” Her presence like the aroma of her food lingers in our house.

late summer woods
somewhere in the fog
repeated calls of a Sāmbhar

tracery of trees
shadows gather
in the grey gloaming

tang of smoke
a moth’s blurred flight
into the butter lamp

Sonam Chhoki

Notes

*1. cattails, October 2019

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, 30th November:  

Week 1 haibun photo 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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