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| Issue 30: | Sept. 2025 |
| Cheribun: | 96 words |
By Adelaide B. Shaw
Too Soon
An ordinary sun-filled school day. Laughter and lessons. Plans made for later, for tomorrow, next week. Dismissal time and on to sports, fun with friends, family, home. An ordinary sun-filled day until ... the sun goes out with the first shot and darkness fills the hallways.
another bleak headline so many young souls flying to heaven too soon not anyone I know, still, I shed tears and pray a confused mind loosens his demons with speed that stops time for many terror and sorrow questions with no answers and again, more promises to change laws
—Long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3
Adelaide B. Shaw
lives in Somers, New York. She has been creating in Japanese poetic forms—haiku, haibun, tanka, tanka prose, and haiga—for more than 50 years. Her book of haiku An Unknown Road (Modern English Tanka Press, 2008) won third place in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards for 2009. Her other books include these published by Cyberwit: Ancient History: haibun and tanka prose (2023); Choices: a collection of stories (2021); Travel Souvenirs: haiku from near and far (2020); and The Distance I’ve Come: my haiku journey (2019).
Adelaide’s poetic works have been published widely in journals and magazines, including Acorn, Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, Haibun Today, Haiga Online, KYSO Flash, The Loch Raven Review, Modern Haiku, Presence, Red Lights, tinywords, Triveni Haikai India, Under the Bashō, World Haiku Review, and elsewhere; as well as in The Living Haiku Anthology and in several annual editions of The Red Moon Anthology of English Language Haiku.
Adelaide also writes fiction, and her stories have appeared in American Literary Review, The Bangalore Review, Bartleby Snopes, Bewildering Stories, Byline, The Green Silk Journal, The Loch Raven Review, MacGuffin, and SNReview, among others.
Some of her published poems and haiga are posted on her blog:
White Petals
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1847, ekphrastic haiku sequence in KYSO Flash (Issue 6, Fall 2016)
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