Only Mother can see what she is responding to. This is not entirely new. But now she sees loved ones who have passed long ago. “Everyone’s here,” she says. Then a while later, “They’re gone now.”

gathering storm

What is it like to be a part of a transition like that, being half-born into a new dimension? A hospice nurse says that my mother is slipping out of the physical realm to more fully occupy the spiritual self.

I try on tomorrow’s coat

She sleeps as if she is wrapping into a chrysalis. I imagine her untangling from earth-bound tethers to stretch something like wings, to dissolve into light. Her almost-ending is increasingly ripe with almost-beginning.

to see if it fits

Kat Lehmann

is a haiku poet, a potter, and a scientist based in Connecticut, USA. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has been honored in The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Awards (individual poem), the Haiku Society of America Harold G. Henderson Haiku Award, and Japan’s Basho-an Award.

Kat is a Founding Co-Editor of Whiptail: Journal of the Single-Line Poem and and an Associate Editor at Sonic Boom. She serves as a panelist in The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2021-present) and is a judge in the annual Trailblazer Contest. Her third book, Stumbling Toward Happiness, shares her notes of self-exploration.

Kat’s work, including her experimental “sudo-ku” multi-haiku form, can be read at her new website: https://katlehmann.weebly.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Sensory Revelation Tank, haibun by Kat Lehmann which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).