I often think how, once, you and I, sitting in the park, put up an umbrella we’d found, hiding away from parents, teachers, homework, sibling rivalry, park attendants, priding ourselves how grown up we were, as, out of sight, we did declare...

shady beach
so many secrets
under the shade

...a mutual interest a bit beyond hand-holding, at which point, you carved a split with your nail file “big enough to let the sun in,” but then, soon after, in came the rain, spoiling everything, and you said “home,” so we did and somehow never got to meet again.

abandoned
a wrecked umbrella
still damp

Peter Butler

turned to poetry after a long career as a journalist, editor, and feature writer in book publishing and industry. He has published two well-received collections of poetry, Lunch at Shakespeare’s Local and Teatime on the Moon, and his ventures into haiku and its variants have been published in the USA and UK. A Piece of Shrapnel is his first haibun collection. *

Butler lives in London and is a frequent guest reader on the poetry circuit.

[* Note: Three haibun from his first collection appear in Issue 3 of KYSO Flash.]

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Things in My Attic, a haibun by Peter Butler in Haibun Today (Volume 8, No. 2, June 2014), which was among the finalists chosen for The Best Small Fictions 2015 (Queen’s Ferry Press, October 2015).

⚡ Writing Haibun in the Freedoms of Suburbia: A Personal Path by Peter Butler in Haibun Today (Volume 9, No. 3, September 2015)

⚡ On Peter Butler’s The Trouble with Mona Lisa by Patricia Prime in Haibun Today (Volume 9, No. 3, September 2015)

⚡ Commentary on Peter Butler’s Ekphrastic Haibun by Ray Rasmussen in Contemporary Haibun Online (Volume 11, No. 2, July 2015)