Sunday Morning – a haibun by Keith Polette

Sunday Morning

Bananas slouch in the fruit bowl next to apples that loll like beached buoys.  An aspen tree rattles in the wind.  Sparrows settle in the yard like curled leaves, while the sun, defrocked of clouds, dangles like the bottom of a banjo after being played.  A faint moon, that ventriloquist of light, slowly fades, turning its gaze back to the dark.  

	sunflower burst
	the kettle singing atop
	petals of flame

Down the hill and past the field, as if it had been birthed in gravel, a train unhooks itself from silence and blows its horn, heaving the freight of its two-note chant into the day.  The incense of diesel lingers in the air.  A cicada, out of season, is fixed fast in its genuflection upon a tree.  On the riverbank, turtles, like the beads of a rosary, bask in untamed light.  The porcelain bowl inside the house waits to spill its secrets . . . 

	empty turtle shell
	a hand-carved chalice
	waiting for wine  

If only the spider pulsing in the woodshed web would recite its single sin.  

	beneath the desert 
	a host of red-spotted toads
	ready to rise



Keith Polette has published poems in both print and online journals.  His book of haibun, pilgrimage, received the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2021.