Editors Choice Haiku, Dec 2012

December 2012

The Editor’s Choice

of this issue

is the winner of the First Place in the Shintai Haiku genre of World Haiku Review

your hospital gown

your unworn winter clothing

still kept packed away

by Marie Shimane

In all things death is everything. Let me explain. Death is in a sense synonymous with end. All good things come to an end. Mercifully, so do all bad things, even if they seem to go on forever. In the ending all good things and all bad things come to the same thing, into nil and void where beginning and ending vanish. Hospitals are useless for those patients who have already gone, let alone the gowns they were wearing while there. In this poem the winter clothing prepared for the return home of the beloved from his hospital was sadly never to be worn. Neither the gown nor the winter clothing has been given away to the remaining family members as a memento or to charities or disposed of as waste. They have simply been packed away since the difficult time immediately following the death.

The present writer also has lost his wife to cancer for some time on a snowy day as cold as the time of writing. Her pink hospital gown is still hanging in his bathroom and her winter clothing in the wardrobe. A few items belonging to her have been gratefully and lovingly received by her relations and best friends. Each time, it was for me like losing her again. However, her pearl necklace, for instance, is now adorning one of her best friends, thus keeping another living woman happy and wonderful. The acute sorrow felt by this friend is being tempered with her loving memories of my late wife, focused on this necklace. Sorrow is the other side of the same coin of love. These and other noble human sentiments are far more precious than gold and to the mind of the present writer last forever, for the simple reason that they are not “things”.