Haibun by Ken Jones

I was away last week at a transpersonal psychology conference near Scarborough, and we spent some time on the Saturday night entertaining each other with music and song and story and even a magic trick or two. I wanted to contribute but hadn't thought to prepare anything, so quietly googled away until I found one of Ken Jones' haibun from a journal he edited (which is still going strong), Contemporary Haibun Online.

Haibun is a literary form developed in Japan that combines haiku and prose, and Ken was a widely recognised authority - I know many of us (including me!) picked up a copy of his collection Bog Cotton that he brought to sesshin a couple of years ago. He'd refer to his haibun in talks and occasionally even give an example... though as I found out last Saturday, they do lose something when spoken aloud as the layout is important and switch from prose to poetry and back isn't always immediately obvious.

Still, it went down well (except for the guy who had met Ken but didn't know he'd died... oops...) and thought I'd post it here, too, as this is one that Zennies will have particular resonances with.

Who
Ken Jones

I turn up the flame
from the snaking wick
coiled in my flammable heart

Although he is my lifelong friend I’m in two minds about him. Sometimes I don’t recognise him at all, with his ugly old face. Or I don’t like the way he can behave.

Perched on the wing mirror
robin preens himself
and shits

Then I play at being top dog and growl at him. But when he’s being helpful and kind, now there’s a man after my own heart. And isn’t it strange how other people seem to like him more than I do? The best of times is when he lets his shoulders drop and we’re drawn in together and lost, in a landscape, another person, a poem or whatever. Beyond all that neediness and choosiness, like this oak which shelters us from the autumn rains.

Branching without a thought
this way and that
for two hundred years

The trouble is that every morning there’s the two of us, grimacing in the shaving mirror. Tomorrow I’ll offer a smile.

Guttering
my smoky flame
muttering to itself

Source: http://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/pages84/zz_Jones_Who.html