WHC New Year's Eve Haibun Kukai

WHC HAIBUN KUKAI
  FIRST PLACE
SECOND PLACE
THIRD PLACE
SPECIAL AWARD
HONORABLE MENTION 1
HONORABLE MENTION 2
HONORABLE MENTION

 

FIRST PLACE

THE SNOW THAT I AM
Marjorie Buettner

The snow has fallen all day and into the night on this   New Year's Eve. As I walk in the dark air, I swallow deeply each breath so that it enters the center of my body, now fortified. The snow seems to grow as I walk; soft and yielding, each step forms a deep valley edged with hills; each step becomes an open palm curled upward in supplication or prayer. It is slow going this snow-walk. I try to think of how I could lighten my step; I think of hot air and how it rises quietly and naturally to the height of each room, and then hovers there. I think of the invisible flight of a bird at night and the sound of its wings touching this tender air--the only thing traceable, traced. I think of sleep and how the body disappears when the dreaming mind becomes physical, and you are there, then, touching me.

Suddenly, in the distance, a train emerges and passes thickly into the still, dark night; the rocking motion of its wheels over steel and the rhythmic whistle all sound heavy, old. The weight of this sound bores through the diaphanous space that surrounds me. This sound leaves the air motionless, leaden, and its extended weight upon the body mortal burns a hole into the snow that is, into the snow that I am.

Still, the sky remains clouded, ambiguous, dark, yet from this formless mass, like feathers from the wings of newly hatched birds, fall lightly upon the eyelids, the face, my lips, white crystals of snow so frail, failing, yet luminous. Amid this airy falling snow, I turn to view the distance in which I have moved; behind stretches a path of fresh snow. The once hollow footprints have now become round regions of pregnant bellies, white, rising, and as full as this New Year's Eve twilight.

New Year's Eve walk~
how this falling snow answers
my deepest questions