Minor Histories
John W. Sexton, Ireland

Mum sends me for the morning paper.

In his garden Mister Fothers is at the hydrangeas, putting rusted nails into their pink heads to turn them blue. At the main road a bus goes past carrying the sun in its upper deck, its windows unbearably bright. In the Pakistani newsagents I buy The Daily Mirror.

Back from the shop I look through the paper at the kitchen table. There’s a Festival of Children in Vietnam so U.S. bombers have dropped some toys on the mountain villages as an act of goodwill. Arsenal has beaten Nottingham Forest at Highbury in their weekday match. There’s going to be a sugar shortage but the story is boring so I don’t read beyond the headline. Garth and Professor Lumiere are trapped in a metal cylinder at the center of the Earth.

Liam calls and we go down to the canal next to the railway line. Liam throws stones into the green water. I launch a raft made of rushes and we wait as the current carries it away.

Under the shade of a weeping willow we talk about Batman. We look up at the sky, an inscrutable grey.

ripe dandelions
future meadows
drift past

John W. Sexton lives in Ireland. His haiku, tanka and haibun have appeared in Ginyu, Modern Haiku, Simply Haiku, Contemporary Haibun, CHO, The Heron’s Nest, The 58th Basho Festival Haiku Anthology, The Mainichi Daily News, The Illustrated Ape and also in translation in the Irish language publications Feasta and Lá. His first collection of haiku, Shadows Bloom / Scáthanna Faoi Bhláth, with translations into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock, was recently published by Doghouse. His children’s novels The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed are published by The O’Brien Press.

Copyright 2005: Simply Haiku