Michele Root-Bernstein

Perspectives

Trudging through a Swiss meadow. Up, up the mountain in Mom’s life before us. Complaining of the heat. The ache in our legs. The hole in our hungry. Mom makes us sing a marching song in French—all un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq of us. As our ears fill with how high we can count, we hop the cow pies, follow the goat tracks and, past the death of Mom’s maman, we miss the war papa went off to when she was just a little girl. Almost in no time, somewhere around thirty or forty, we get where she is going. To see how things look from the summit. 

trick of the light years ago still clanging in the bellflowers

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About the Author

Michele Root-Bernstein devotes herself to haiku, haibun, and haiga. The former book review editor of Modern Haiku, she currently facilitates 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.