A child pyro with easy access to ashtrays. Smell of smoke ubiquitous. Mesmerized by flare and sulphurous flash. Burning matches held until fingers sting. Child pyro grows up in a world that burns, the sting now an ache, an ache of how and why that burns from the inside out while outside the smell of wet wood fire pit smoke pools in the low spot in the neighborhood and every breath brings an acrid blackness to lungs, even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin. Child pyro orphaned by lung cancers, never addicted, planting for possibility in a future free from fire.
A child mesmerized by
flare and flash
grows up
outside
in the neighborhood,
the trees their kin,
possibility a future fire.
a flare grows –
up in the trees
fire
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2025
What a doozy of a Poetry Sisters Challenge this month! The Poetry Foundation article about this form (invented by poet torrin a. greathouse) states:
A burning haibun must be composed of three (or more) parts—an initial prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and an erasure of the previous erasure down to a haiku. Additional segments of erasure may be integrated, but keep in mind the continuity of the piece.
The erasures are intended to be sequential and persistent. Once a piece of text has been blacked out, or burned away, it should not return. Furthermore, each erasure should represent some form of reorientation from the previous section, altering the meaning, tone, etcetera.
The focus of a burning haibun—in contrast to traditional haibun—should be on an interior landscape, by which I mean the landscape of memory. Though the form emerged from a meditation upon the contours of traumatic memory, you should by no means feel confined to writing within that space.
Somewhere within the poem’s text, something must burn.
What the Poetry Foundation doesn’t state is how tricky these are to write! Do you start with a mind-dump that becomes some kind of prose poem (whatever that is) that gets burned up as sequentially as the above quote would have you believe? Or do you start with a haiku and reverse-engineer the whole thing? Or do you write a paragraph, make it as weird as possible so as to seem like a prose poem, then pull a haiku out, go back and burn up the middle section, only to realize when you go to make the images for your post that you have broken the rules by using words you burned in the middle section for your haiku and have to start over again with the second two parts? (You might infer which of these processes was mine…)
I can’t wait to see what the other Poetry Sisters created!
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Jone has this week’s Halloween Poetry Friday roundup at Jone Rush MacCulloch.
The fire in my images is via Unsplash.
A(nother) Year of Reading 