all week long a band of carpenter bees has returned to our newly finished deck trying as hard as they can to carve perfect little holes in the freshly stained wood in hopes of making a new home and future offspring that will come back and do it all again next spring

but as beautiful and necessary as these tiny creatures are I cannot allow them to continue and so I must keep them away with a long-handled broom and a good can of spackling paste while offering forgiveness as the Good Lord does for me

blending with the sound
of my neighbor’s weed eater
buzzing of small wings

Ryan Jessup

is a Christian, a husband, a father, a poet, and a downhill skateboarder. His work has appeared in KYSO Flash, Contemporary Haibun Online, Haibun Today, Lynx, Notes from the Gean, Relief Journal, and others. His haibun have twice been included in the annual print anthology of Contemporary Haibun Online, most recently in KYSO Flash Anthology of Haibun and Tanka Forms 2015, and is forthcoming in the Snapshot Press eChapbook Awards print anthology of the best haibun from the first four years of the awards. He lives with his wife and kids in the foothills of North Carolina.

Please visit Ryan Jessup’s listing at Poets & Writers for more information.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Light in Contemporary Haibun Online (Volume 8, No. 3, October 2013)

⚡ On Peter Butler’s A Piece of Shrapnel, a review in Haibun Today (Volume 7, Volume 1, March 2013)