My granddaughter on the swing laughs and the world becomes a bright bubble floating up towards the sun. She wants me to see that she is not a girl but a butterfly or bird flying higher and higher until she has all but disappeared. She babbles in toddler language and touches my hand and I understand I am up there, too, a small speck glittering blue in an expanse of sky.

my granddaughter’s perfect
pronunciation—
Buddha

Marjorie Buettner

is an award-winning haiku and tanka poet whose work is published widely throughout the U.S. and U.K. She lives and writes in Minnesota and has taught haiku and tanka at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Her new collection of haibun is Some Measure of Existence (Red Dragonfly Press, 2014), which tied for first place in the 2015 Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Awards (The Haiku Society of America). Seeing It Now, her collection of haiku and tanka, was published in 2008 by Red Dragonfly Press.

Her most recent journal publication credits are: Contemporary Haibun Online, Modern English Tanka, American Tanka, Simply Haiku, Ribbons, Gusts, Modern Haiku, and Frogpond. Her work has also appeared in the following anthologies: Landfall, Ash Moon Anthology, Fire Pearls, Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart, County Roads, and The Tanka Prose Anthology.

Buettner serves as a Resident Columnist for Cattails, the journal for UHTS (United Haiku and Tanka Society), and she also writes book reviews for Gusts and Modern Haiku.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Return Message: A Pilgrim’s Way of Longing, a work by Marjorie Buettner first presented at “The Cradle of American Haiku” Festival (22 August 2008), and now archived in PDF at The Haiku Foundation website