I just need to walk, so I walk. Skip lunch. Surf the sway and surge of crowds. Fall through the doors of an art museum full of uniformed soldiers and landscapes in realistic hues. Not my thing, but I listen to its pull. Climb the stairs. Cruise the floors. Pace steady. Eyes scanning for something to slow the cruel rhythm of these hours.

words too late her longest winter unspoken

I round a corner and freeze. It’s the painting from atop our hallway mirror in my childhood home. Only the real thing. And large. I ease toward the tiny plaque. It’s called Hope. The creepy image that quickened my steps to my bedroom. Hope. It has a name and a fancy frame. Hope is kept secure by full-time guards.

a generation fallen maple leaves in autumn

Hope is a woman wrapped in flowing cloth. Blindfolded. Sitting on top of the world. She wears the blues of a seamless sky. Her lyre is broken with one string left. She tilts her head to hear its tiny song. It’s what she can do, so she’s doing it. Her captors be damned.

grief doves a low coo summer song

And my captors be damned too. The complicated hospice room. Hope. The phantoms that linger in the corners. Hope. I hear a single note plucked inside my mind. The lyre string of one silver word vibrates and subsides. I lean closer to hear it.

detecting spring the wish upon a star

Hope (oil on canvas; second version, 1886), by British painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), is held by the Tate Britain in London. Image was downloaded from the public domain via Wikimedia Commons on 22 June 2025:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assistants_and_George_Frederic_Watts_-_Hope_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Comprehensive details about this iconic painting are available at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(Watts)

Kat Lehmann

is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize and The Haiku Foundation’s 2020 Touchstone Award for Individual Poem. Her sudo-ku mini-chapbook to wade through the wind as a night is forthcoming from Ghost City Press (summer 2025).

Kat served as a panelist for The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2021-2023), and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. A former research biochemist, Kat explores the grandiose within tiny haiku-genre poems, the storytelling possibilities of haibun, and experimentation with single- and multi-haiku forms. She lives in Connecticut with her family.

Author’s website: https://katlehmann.weebly.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Guests Kat Lehmann and Roberta Beary on “Experimental Haibun”: Episode 72 of The Poetry Space podcast by Katie Dozier and Timothy Green (2 August 2024)

⚡ Two Favorites: On Structure (“An Exploration into Haibun’s Fourth Element”) by Kat Lehmann in Contemporary Haibun Online (18.2, August 2022)

⚡ MacQ Author Index lists links for two dozen of Kat’s haibun, one of her cheribun, and two of her collaborative micro-poems with Bryan Rickert.