All evening the ocean has maintained a noisy silence, a busy calm. It slaps the shore, drags rocks out to sea and pushes them back. I sit and listen. I suppose I want to receive a message, want the universe to address me. Of course, looking for a sign is a sure way of missing the call. Clouds cloak and uncloak the moon. I see things in the clouds and watch them become something else, but I can only see what I know—animals and faces, a fox’s snout, a witch’s warted chin. Burnt-out stars billions of years and miles away zap me with starlight. To be honest, I don’t feel a thing although I would hope it illuminated me in some way. My problem is the ocean. It sings to me, which makes it hard to sit and listen. I want to dance.

moonshadow
the rocking chair
finds its groove

Bob Lucky

is a regular contributor to haiku, haibun, and tanka journals. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SurVision, Haibun Today, The Haibun Journal, and Contemporary Haibun Online (the latter for which he served as content editor from July 2014 thru January 2020).

His chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. His chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018) was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. He is also the author most recently of a collection of prose poems, haibun, and senryu, My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019); and an e-chapbook, What I Say to You (proletaria.org, 2020).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Posthumous Lesson From My Mother and The Party, two haibun by Bob Lucky which were nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).

⚡ Featured Poet: Bob Lucky in Issue 10 of MacQ