Lew Watts

Y Bont

a mirrored golden shovel*

the way birdsong stops at the bridge

It wasn’t just the bridge, it was the sound the
water made—a gurgled groan, the way
a sow drowns in a slurried sty, or birdsong
fades to a bubbled hush when the day stops
dead. So I’d always cup my ears and stare at
the ground, holding my breath as I rushed past the
broken rail—pausing to pray was a bridge
too far. But then one day a burst of birdsong
rose from the river, and I found myself no
longer numb and paralyzed, no longer
alone but sure there was no way of stopping
the suffocating screams. Instead, her voice, at
once beautiful and clear, broke free, and the
words were for me, and the bridge became a bridge.

birdsong
no longer stopping
at the bridge

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* A golden shovel is a poetic form invented by the poet Terrance Hayes; it borrows a line from an existing poem and uses each word to end the lines of a new poem. Here, in “Y Bont,” the “source” haiku (from Kingfisher 5) supplies the words that are then reordered to form the second, ending haiku.

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About the Author

Lew Watts is haibun co-editor of Frogpond and author of two Snapshot Press books, Tick-Tock (2019) and Eira (2023), the latter of which won a 2024 Touchstone Award and Best Book of Haibun in the HSA Merit Book Awards. He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023).

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