They could be comets, or commas suddenly blown out of sentences, those barn swallows cavorting through the cul-de-sac at twilight. How far from dolor they are, these blue-backed birds that dip and dart like springs with wings. They seem to come from nowhere, erupting into the air like sparks from a grinder’s wheel. Delighting in disorder, they ride white-water surges invisible to the human eye. They are the end of a snapped whip, flames flicked from a hot god’s hand, flares fired in fading light.

wind lifted feather ...
my first lesson in flicker flight
on a warm night

Not the falcon dropping like a deadly bolt, or the crane shaking the air with wide wingbeats, or the heron coloring the sky with an impressionist’s brush, no, I follow the swallows, as my heart rides the zip-line of breath. Icarus momentarily without ignorance, I feel myself lifted just beneath the sun’s reach, learning the first steps of tap-dancing in the air.

solar flares—
Hendrix on the radio
as I touch the sky

My reach is always towards swallows, the flash-points of joy, as they arc and angle into the approaching night like notes sprung from a Stravinsky symphony.

reddening clouds
the edge of a curved wing
burning bright

Keith Polette

lives and writes in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of two collections of haibun, Soundings (Alba Publishing, 2023) and Pilgrimage (Red Moon Press, 2020). The latter received the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2021 for Best Haibun Book and was shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2020. His collection of haiku, The New World (Red Moon Press, 2017), was shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2017.

Polette’s poetry has appeared in numerous print and online venues, including Amethyst Review, The Esthetic Apostle, Eunoia Review, High Desert Journal, The Limberlost Review, One Sentence Poems, Otoliths Magazine, The Offbeat, Peeking Cat Anthology 2018, Piedmont Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Typishly, and Valley Voices: A Literary Review.

His photo-haiku have appeared in Daily Haiga and Under the Bashō, and his haibun in Akitsu Quarterly, Blithe Spirit, Chrysanthemum, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Frogpond Journal, The Haibun Journal, Haibun Today, The Other Bunny, Presence, Prune Juice, and Sonic Boom Journal.

Polette’s publications also include articles on Language Arts pedagogy, literary criticism, and Jungian studies.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Featured Writer: Keith Polette, “First person reflections on the art of writing haibun” in contemporary haibun online 17.2 (August 2021)

⚡ The Boy Speaks in contemporary haibun online 19.1 (April 2023)

⚡(suspension bridge), photo-haiku in Under the Bashō (2022)

⚡(abandoned diner), photo-haiku in Daily Haiga (16 October 2018)

⚡Three photo-haiku [(faded paint–); (tune up–), and (vanishing point–)] in Under the Bashō (3 April 2018)