Jennifer Hambrick
Green
Originally released in O:JA&L in 2020, this haibun is included in Hambrick’s new book Joyride, now in release from Red Moon Press.
Out in the street high school kids are dribbling basketballs six feet away from each other, their shouts and squeals muffled by cloth face masks. They’re too young to know how death closes in around them. The sun angles into evening. A cardinal sings from a burning bush flush with life. Clouds pass by leaving blue overhead.
cold spring
the bird house
empty
About the writer:
A multi-Pushcart Prize nominee, Jennifer Hambrick won the 2020 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for her free verse poetry collection, In the High Weeds; won the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize, and won First Place in the 2018 Haiku Society of America Haibun Award Competition. Hambrick authored the poetry collections Joyride (Red Moon Press) and Unscathed (NightBallet Press), and hundreds of her free verse and Japanese short-form poems appear in publications around the world. She is a frequent recipient of poetry commissions and has received numerous awards for her poetry, including from Tokyo’s NHK World TV, Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Ohio Poetry Association, and others. An Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist in creative writing, Hambrick is also a public radio host and producer, video producer, and web producer in Columbus.
Image: Youth by Hennie Niemann jnr. Oil on Belgian linen. 150 x 130 cm. 2016. By free license.
