Michele Root-Bernstein
Sketch for a Fairy Tale
Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived across the street
and we played at her house with her tiny disney toys
and when our play was done we sometimes watched tv
and sometimes too many times her father made me sit in his lap
and just once the little girl begged for me to sleep over
and that once in the middle of the night her father pulled back the bedcovers
and I turned into a plastic doll
and when the birds cried nearly dawn I ran home
keeping the secret all day until I didn’t and dusk flooded my mother’s sky
and just that once she said I mayn’nt go there ever again and not to
and then she tucked me in behind a shrub rose and said sweet dreams
and I slept and slept and slept
in a dense thicket of forget
until, once upon a long time after, my doll eyes opened
startling the light first shadow
About the Author
Michele Root-Bernstein devotes herself to haiku, haibun, and haiga. The former book review editor of Modern Haiku, she until recently facilitated the Michigan-based Evergreen Haiku Study Group. Her e-chapbook Wind Rose (Snapshot Press) received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award honorable mention in 2020. She won the 2022 Snapshot Press Book Awards for her full-length collection Plainsong.
Wow!
Powerful and beautifully rendered.
Knowing your always-surprising and resonant work, I began reading this haibun in anticipation of its turn to the unanticipated. And there it was in the fourth stanza: “and sometimes too many times…” Lew’s comment “Wow!” pretty much sums up my response to this remarkable haibun; remarkable in nearly every detail. I would like to say, however, that your form/title “Sketch for a Fairy Tale” is a brilliant, new way to transcend time, to combine in one voice and vision the child’s innocence and the adult’s “once upon a long time after” awakening to what happened. Really impactful. Thank you.
Oof, so powerful. Shades of Sleeping Beauty with a dark twist. The way the innocent and pure details like the toys, doll, birds, rose bush and “sweet dreams” contrast with the darkness and evil of the implied child sexual abuse. First shadow indeed!