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© 2013 Allan Brown Allan Brown's first publication, in May, 1962, was of two haiku in the Canadian journal Mountain. He has published two book-length collections of haiku — What Day Is It? (Far Field Press, 2004) and a penny in the grass (Ekstasis Editions, 2006).He is a member of Haiku Canada and the pacifi-kana haiku group, as well as the Federation of B.C. Writers and the League of Canadian Poets. "Butterfly or Bird" first appeared in The Antigonish Review. The title and two phrases ( "a stranger," and "weightless upon my wrist") are adapted from P.K.'s "At Sea" (Evening Dance of the Grey Flies).

Butterfly or Bird
(for P. K. Page, January 14, 2010)

There, in that uncertain place
between the shadows of —
what are they? birches, or
something like; a kind of
once into and through those words
we casually recognized:
                                          "I
was in Brazil in the '50s also,
but a bit before you, I guess,
and not for so long."
                                   Those words
or, well, something like them,
pieces almost familiar enough
to fit together again when
this stranger passes unnoticed as
a small air upon my wrist,
weightless, on this Thursday of
the first week in Ordinary Time.

 

 

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