THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 18th July 2024. Sonam Chhoki, featured poet

hosts: Kala Ramesh & Firdaus Parvez

mentor: Lorraine Haig

A Thursday Feature.

poet of the month: Sonam Chhoki

18th July 2024

This month we have the pleasure of featuring Sonam Chhoki

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails. 

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geetanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021.

http://www.cattailsjournal.com/currentissue.html

When my father became prayer flags . . .

Through monsoon clouds a golden haze radiates in the west. Gamboge tendrils of bitter gourd vines flutter noiselessly in the breeze. In the courtyard of the ancestral house 108 prayer flags flap in unison. I murmur the mantra on the silken banners:

OM MANI PADME HUM

Invocation to Chen-re-zi, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, to negate my father’s bad karma and guide him through the bar-do.

Just a week ago, my father and I walked where the prayer flags now stand. A raven alights on the crown of a towering prayer flagpole. What does it see? Does it know where the dead go?

fog in the valley -

long creak of prayer wheels

into the night

Frogpond, 33.1, Winter 2010 

Obituary for Vanished Hope

Like the Snow Lotus in the mountain wind, you’ve gone. That dawn, unable to sleep, I tiptoed to the veranda stippled by gossamer rifts of the moon. I felt you for the first time. Your nascent warmth seeped to my cold fingers. No scan could have picked you then. My heart beat to a new rhythm. Did the gods envy our un-shareable love? They sought their malicious revenge. You bled from my womb.

December rain—

a single Acer leaf floats

to the heap below

A Hundred Gourds 3:2 March 2014

We asked Sonam a few questions and she graciously made time to answer them. Here's the next:

THG: How do you create diversity in your writing?

Sonam: One of the ways this has happened for me is a collaboration with Mike Montreuil. Mike has a Catholic and Métis background and is fluent in French and English. He is technologically far more switched on than I am. He writes in concise, unadorned style often tinged with irony. He says my writing is “the emotive use of the English language”. In addition to these differences, Mike writes about the Canadian role in the World Wars. Bhutan was completely isolated from these world events. This pushed me to engage with a totally new historical perspective and experience.

We also combined various short forms in our collaboration:

A Meal for Days

There’s a lull in the construction of the Expressway. A bulldozer with mud-caked blade looks stranded amidst the debris of the rice fields it has ploughed up. As if freed of competition, a couple of scarlet minivets start up a chorus of mimicking chain saws.

tourist season

a homeless man moves

street to street

abandoned house

the jagged walls

point

to the cloudless sky

like accusing fingers

The storm door is ready to fall off its hinges. One or two more swings and it will probably crash on the front porch while taking out the handrail. An elderly woman steps outside onto the porch and starts shouting, “Arthur! . . . Arthur!! Get your ass over here! There are chores to be done!”

Arthur is not in sight. He is down at the creek, hoping to catch a few brook trout with his father’s fishing pole. Content, the boy casts a fly into the water. It is so much better under the old maple tree than being in his room at the back of their government-issued prefab house.

He realizes that it is late in the afternoon, as shadows begin to cover the creek. Arthur also knows his grandmother is calling out for him. Chores are waiting and winter will come much too soon.

lost

in the wailing sirens

a sibia’s plaintive song

songbirds now quiet

in the waning summer

a garter snake

catches a leopard frog

its meal for days

Mapping Absences, 2019, Sonam Chhoki, Mike Montreuil, Éditions de petits nuages, Ottawa, Canada

Prompt:

The first two well-crafted haibun share a common thread: an understated grief. Sonam uses imagery and sensory details to evoke this emotion in the reader. The haibun featuring both tanka and haiku is well done too, and I'd encourage you to try it out for yourselves (although haikuKATHA is not accepting them as yet, so don't post them here). Let us know your thoughts on these haibun. Your prompt for the week is GRIEF. Interpret it as you like. Have fun!

Haibun outside this prompt is welcome too.

Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!

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PLEASE NOTE:

1. Only two haibun per poet per prompt. Please put your name and country of residence under your poem, it makes the editors' work easier. Thanks.

2. Share your best-polished pieces.

3. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written.

Let it simmer for a while.

4. When poets give suggestions and if you agree to them - post your final edited version on top of your original version.

5. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished haibun (within 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly journal.