2024 Touchstone Award Winner for Individual Haibun – Lorraine Haig

Lorraine Haig is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun for 2024 for this haibun:

He slices through the pristine reflections in his tinny. It’s high tide. Zipping up creeks like a dragonfly, he slides on the slick surface, planes over submerged logs and vanishes into the high reaches to empty and bait his pots. He works fast or he’ll remain stranded on the dropping tide.

Meanwhile, I’m taking our three-year-old daughter on a bus to attend weekly therapy classes. First, it is speech. After that, plastic shapes are strewn across the table. Her hands spasm as she tries to push the blocks through matching holes.

Hauling a trap to the surface among the mangrove’s smooth limbs, he hears the click of their breathing. In the pot five startled crabs cling like rock climbers, their eyes swivelling in fright. He shakes them out to scatter about his bare feet, re-baits and lowers the pot overboard.

It’s the last session, she fears the most. The swing spins to a stop. The therapist steadies her head and stares into spinning green eyes. She’s relieved when it’s over and we catch the bus for home.

Pinning each crab under his big toe, he straitjackets the claws. Scuttling sideways they hide under the wet sacks in the bow. He pours coffee and lights a smoke, watching the water rise and fall like the lungs of his sleeping child.

depth of blue
a stingray circles
the aquarium

 

—Lorraine Haig, haikuKATHA Issue 37

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Commentary from the Panel: 

This interesting and unusual form of haibun has two parallel connected narratives. Alternating stanzas are braided together, juxtaposing the flow of an outgoing tide and the progressive challenges to a three-year-old daughter who requires help with some form of developmental issue. One parent is taking the little girl to a remedial class, while the other parent, likely a commercial fisher, is away catching mud crabs for a living. The narrative shifts scenes smoothly and cinematically yet with some urgency as we move between vastly different environments, a mangrove-lined creek and a therapist’s office. The thoughts of one parent, presumably the mother, are expressed in first person and those of the father in third. This choice serves to bring one closer, and to set the other a little apart.

Stanzas one, three, and five describe a father’s life work, crabbing in his boat up tidal creeks. He reads backwaters and tidal movements, and is adept at handling his pots. The prose is rich with poetic devices, utilizing assonance and alliteration in fresh verbs that evoke in the reader a sense of how he’s perpetually in motion, working fast to avoid being stranded by the ebbing tide – “zipping,” “slide,” “slick surface,” “vanishes” – underlining his urgency. Descriptions are vivid and add to a palpable sense of entrapment – “straitjackets the claws.” Stanzas two and four describe the other parent, who “meanwhile” has the challenge of taking their daughter to weekly therapy.

From the title to the closing haiku there is a claustrophobic sense of confinement. The first stanza sets the scene for these two realities and links into the title. The use of repetition between the stanzas heightens their impact. The toddler is confined within her reality and is uncomfortable with and even fearful of the therapies she undergoes. For example, the description of her fright and “spinning green eyes” echoes the “startled crabs…their eyes swiveling in fright.” And the father’s deft maneuvers with his boat and crabs contrast starkly with the uncertain movements of his daughter, whose hands spasm with her attempts at fine motor control.

The haibun conveys both the parents’ and the child’s hard work at survival, a human condition fraught with universal meaning. “Trapped,” woven together with strands of prose stanzas depicting this family’s struggles, concludes with the powerful and potentially melancholic image in the last line of the father’s narrative, as he watches “… the water rise and fall like the lungs of his sleeping child.” With his captives secured and liberated from his daily battle with the tide, the father turns to thinking about what his child must be enduring in her own private confrontation with her physical limitations.

The concluding haiku effectively shifts from the father’s work at sea to an aquarium, where a stingray circles, trapped in a “depth of blue,” evoking a sorrowful feeling which resounds with the mother, father and child’s, and also the crab’s, efforts to live and love. It reinforces the theme, hints at the parents’ state of mind, and also the child’s own fears, leaving us with no easy solution. The haibun is distinctive for its sensitive treatment of the disability/recovery of a child – it is more common to encounter family-centered haibun with behavioral/cognitive issues associated with aging parents.