Lew Watts
The Prosodies of Dawn
Some days, I simply close my eyes and listen.
Like yesterday, when I awoke, uncertain where I was or who I am, the window opened just enough to click the shutter’s slats. I listened for the rhythm of your voice, but all I heard were first light’s fluttering of leaves. And then…
Fee-bee. And again, more faintly, fee-bee. Chickadees, two rivals, vying for my final wake-up. Time to rise. So down the hall I trudged, my slippers sliding like a soft-shoe-shuffle brush across a snare drum.
Britches and boots for another cold day, alert to the crunch of hard frost and the back-and-forth squeals from the bolt of the barn, and the short snorts of steam as her whinnies began. After two pails of feed, she was saddled up.
On the path to the hill, we broke into a trot before cantering off. All too soon, other sounds rose to answer the clatter and clack of her hooves—from the creaks of the oaks to the scramble of voles as we raced to the ridge.
Where I sat on a lichen-stained stone, willing my pulse to slow, listening only to the cadence of blood. Then lifting my head and looking out, across the valley and beyond to the hills, no longer needing sound, hearing purely by sight the syncopation of the world.
running a stick along this horizon Fern Hill . . .
About the Author
Lew Watts is haibun co-editor of Frogpond, and author of Tick-Tock (2019), a haibun collection that won Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards, and Eira (2023), both from Snapshot Press. He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023). He lives in Chicago.
Love the flow of this, Lew. And the imagery (visual and aural) is panoramic. The horizon in the haiku emphasizes that aspect of the prose.
Thanks Richard! I loved writing those paragraphs in their different meters.
A beautiful, lyrical haibun, Lew.
marion
Thank you, Marion! First paragraph iambic, second trochaic, third dactylic, and fourth Anapestic. For the fifth – syncopated stressed lines, to lead into Dylan Thomas . . .
well done, are you more auditory than visual or kinesthetic?
Definitely auditory. Though I often “see” rhythms in the jagged edges of things, translating them in my head to sound, like watching and listening to a seismograph.
Definitely auditory. Though I often “see” rhythms in the jagged edges of things, translating them in my head to sound, like watching and listening to a seismograph.