O:JA&L Mixed Forms: Haibun
Shelley Tracey
Going Around in Circles
My father on his birthday tricycle at four years old, wheels whirring, young child yelling as he whooshes down the hill. Found after frantic searching by his parents, five miles away from home.
Aged eight, he is setting loops of wire around the lintel to trip his older sisters’ suitors. Aged nine and ten, eleven, twelve, lassoing cousins in their catching games with Granny’s washing line. At high school, always ready for a game, tennis ball in hand, football bouncing off his knee, flipping coins for magic tricks.
When we are small, he flips cling peaches from his spoon into our bowls, juice dripping everywhere. He turns dried mangoes into toys. Lemon Tree by Trini Lopez on the gramophone.
From the centre of our railway set, he makes a film for us, his camera to his face, captures the departure of the train, ending at the starting point. My soft pink bunny, long ears trailing, my troll dolls with their startled hair are passengers from here to there to here again. The wind-up dog moves clockwise round the inside of the track.
He dresses us as witches. We flick our wrists and wield our wands, cast spells, mount brooms, and pose for his new feature. He keeps the spools in long tin cases, takes them out years later to show the movies to my children, reels clacking on the old projector.
On the beach, he sets us into deep-dug holes, builds racing cars around us from damp white sand. When I am older, he teaches me to drive, to turn the wheel in calm rotations. He teaches me the circuits of an engine, how to change a tyre.
An architect, he teaches me the circle is the strongest shape; it shares stress evenly around its edge. He draws a perfect one by hand. He teaches me to press the compass point into the page and trace a neat circumference. He teaches me geometry and algebra, but not Venn diagrams. Where two opposing views exist, there are no intersections.
He always takes the long way round, to avoid the house of someone he dislikes. He does not discuss his family, diminished by their secrets. He does not talk about his blaming oldest sister, or the younger one’s evasions.
As he grows older, he spins more into worry. He stands for hours against the long back wall, cigarette inside the hoop of thumb and index finger. He eats two bananas daily, places them, ends touching, on the kitchen counter beside his tubes of pills.
in the hospital
leather ties around his wrists
When can I go home?
About the writer:
Shelley Tracey’s collection Elements of Distance was published by Lapwing (2017). Other poems have been published in The North, Orbis, Abridged, Skylight 47, The Haibun Journal, Stag Hill Journal, Drifting Sands Haibun, North West Words, Honest Ulsterman, Bangor Literary Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Bray Arts Journal. Poems have also appeared in Bloody Amazing, Lighting Out, Recovery, Washing Windows V, and North Star anthologies. Poems have been shortlisted in Poems for Patience, Second Light, Over the Edge and Bangor Poetry competitions. Commissions include poems for ‘The Way It Is’, Community Arts Partnership, and reminiscence poems for c21 Theatre Company.
Image: The Circle is the Strongest Shape (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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