It must have been wintertime because I am wearing the pleated skirt: a thick, white striped tartan that buttons at the waist. I also remember it being dark outside but that might be my imagination’s doing: a foreshadowing of the subterfuge to come.

I dislike this skirt so much I have hatched a plan: if I snip a hole in it with my mother’s manicure scissors and show her the damage, damage that could have easily been caused by snagging it on a fence or a prickly bush, she will declare it un-wearable.

I am four-years-old, have yet to start school, so have not thought this plan through very thoroughly. One, my mother would be able to darn a small hole. And, more significantly, two, I am totally unaware of how pleats work, and how bunching a few of them together and snipping results in a large gaping hole when they fan out from my hand, a hole that will not be mistaken for anything but a willful act of destruction.

In this moment I experience, without being able to articulate it, what time means; how one moment moves into another, how the future is constructed of what we do in the present. How it is possible to long for the past. I ache with the wish to go back to the moment before I closed the scissors around the thick cloth, before I even picked them up from my mother’s dressing-table. To a time before I knew I could feel like this.

three sneezes
all that’s left
of the snowman

—From forgiving the rain (Snapshot Press, 2012); republished by author’s permission

Lynne Rees

is a poet, novelist, short-story writer, and blogger who lives on a working apple farm in Kent (in the UK). Her most recent book, Real Port Talbot (Seren Books, 2013) is an upbeat and offbeat, psycho-geographical account of her home town in South Wales. In 2012, Snapshot Press published her collection of haibun, forgiving the rain, a fragmented memoir on the theme of home.

She began working with haiku forms—haiku, senryu, tanka, rengay, and haibun—in 2006; served as haibun editor at Simply Haiku during 2008 and 2009; and was co-editor, with Jo Pacsoo, of the British Haiku Society’s Haibun Anthology, The Unseen Wind (2010). In 2011 she co-edited, with Nigel Jenkins and Ken Jones, another country: haiku poetry from Wales (Gomer Press, 2011) and served as one of the adjudicators for the haibun section of the inaugural British Haiku Award.

Rees is currently co-editor, along with Bob Lucky, of CHO: Contemporary Haibun Online. She also writes these blogs:

The Hungry Writer: “Eat, Live, Write: the place where food, life and words collide plus writing prompts for other hungry writers”

An Open Field: “Lynne Rees on haiku and haibun—creative and critical”

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ On Lynne Rees’s Forgiving the Rain, a review by Bob Lucky in Haibun Today (Volume 7, Number 4, December 2013)

⚡ Aphrodite, a poem in Silver Birch Press (4 October 2014)

⚡ The Snow Queen, a poem in Silver Birch Press (21 November 2014)