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Charles Hansmann

Confetti

I didn't know I would remember this as a time when fence posts where still wooden and their hollow knots housed a bright populous of bluebirds, a for-granted time when the hill held its own against the road. After her first year of school it seemed in the natural order of things that when my sister called out, "Now!" and I looked up to our bedroom window, from all around snowflakes floated down through the hot summer day, white pieces of permission allowing me to laugh. She had worked for weeks cutting them out of her notebook, her scissors persistent beyond boredom, and stood me in the grass, and from that window above me had overturned her basket. Through the still air I heard the thin paper flakes flittering toward me, the sight and the sound. She had explained this to me all along, as she worked, telling me what it would be like. The cutout snowflakes so lazy in their fall I could see up through them her tiny white teeth as she watched from the window. When it was over the air was clear and silent again. "Jump up here!" she called down, as if now, touched by her worked miracle, magic would come easy to me.

birdnest! and threads
from my red sweater
I find there

The haiku previously published in Lilliput Review 155 25 July 2007