It is okay to have stories that you will never tell anyone.
It is okay to have trees grow inside you that fall when no one is around. It is okay if it is an entire forest.
It is okay if that forest burns one night and turns to desert.
It is okay if in that desert an ugly flower blooms. And you don’t know its name. And you don’t tell anyone.
It is okay because a stranger will see you from a moving bus and think to himself that there must be a big desert inside your heart because your eyes see nothing that they see and there must be in that desert a single flower blooming because you still cast a light.
It is okay if you never meet that stranger and he forgets your face. It is okay that the stranger has no light. It is okay even if that was the best version of yourself and the only one who saw it and mistook it has forgotten about it.
It is okay that it is pointless right up to the end, that no one knows the pain, no one shares the surging joy, that no one sees the suffering. It is okay that it is all for nothing, that the erasure will be swift, will be surgical, the space you occupied will fill quickly, easily, as if it never was, as if you never were. It is okay that your existence is not validated by someone else.
That someone too has stories they are never going to tell.
stopping
suddenly, midway,
this too is a destination
Love the haiku.
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Thank you! It all got too real as I was writing this one!
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“the erasure will be swift, will be surgical, the space you occupied will fill quickly, easily, as if it never was” Perhaps this is a blessing, as that flower moves on to another level of existence? I don’t know. I find the truth of this poem paralizing, and am trying to move on.
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I often wonder about what the point is, whether we are meant to know it even…. unsettling, yes…
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Terrific haibun – heads in one direction – (the desert/flower/bus images are great) and then twirling into another – saved or resolved or looked at differently by the haiku. Muscle memory indeed.
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Thanks so much, Peter!!! That is perhaps the function of the ending haiku.. to turn around and stare back at the prose preceding it :))
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It is all okay, indeed!
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Yup… !!
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June Marathon: 19 down/ 11 to go… ahead is possibly a numbed state… where writing will have to come from muscle memory…
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