Glenn G. Coats
A Day Like No Other
Why are we fishing
when your wife
has such little time
left;
why are we adrift
in the channel
with your shadow
looming
over the engine—
willing it back to life.
Why are we out
in a crowded inlet
where gulls and waves
snap up what’s left
of our words;
why are we on the water
without life jackets
while a coastal storm
is brewing
somewhere beyond
our horizons.
twilight drips from an empty net
About the Author
Glenn G. Coats lives with his wife, Joani, in Carolina Shores, North Carolina. His books include two Snapshot Press collections of haibun, A Synonym for Gone (2021) and Degrees of Acquaintance (2019); Furrows of Snow (Turtle Light Press, 2019), an honorable mention winner in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards; and Another Lost Boat (Pineola Publishing, 2022).
such an impactful poem – the surface words spoken float above the deeper meanings, just like people chat, keeping it “safe”, while way below we grieve.
What a wonderful haibun. How each aspect of the marine environment–fishing; adrift; engine; inlet; gulls; waves; life jackets; storm; horizon–is translated into an extended metaphor that engages the depths of loss and grief. And the form of a series of questions–each without a question mark; each a rhetorical question, and the rhetoric being the language of loss–is truly beautiful, invoking the elegiac mood, where questions are never answered, can never be answered by anything but utter silence and mystery. Also, the startling title–asserting uniqueness, which is both the poem’s achieved trademark and the uniqueness of each person’s grief, of the spousal grief here described, and the sympathetic grief of the writer–is so right for the work. (Of course, the title helps us feel it is also a day like any other; a day when a person is about to die.) And the closing haiku is exquisite and apt. Just wanted to extend some elaborated praise to this wonderful piece! Thank you.
Hello Bill,
I deeply appreciate your thoughts on a poem I found too painful to share with my friends. I was spent after that time on the water, emotionally and physically; spent from knowing we were in the wrong place that day and the words came pouring out.
Best to you,
Glenn