The following is a double “haibun” that I wrote. Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic style, and one or more haiku.
The coat was heavy with history – nights thrown over naked shoulders at smokey Montparnasse cafes, or tossed onto the back of a scarlet sofa at a late night Parisian salon. Its heavily textured fabric masked a delicate residue of absinthe, bathtub gin, and the mascaraed tears of its most passionate devotees. Nina Hamnett, self-proclaimed and notorious “Queen of Bohemia,” wore its gold satin lining next to her skin while she danced shimmering lights into its weave of rich silk brocade. On those nights, the coat created its own melody, a mesmerizing harmony of color, texture, and pattern, the timeless echoes of Sirens’ songs.
from creative abandon
and dazzling artistry
mythos emerges
When war started and the creative effete fled to the safer shores of England and America, the infamous coat reappeared in the window of the Fifth Avenue Parisian boutique that Zelda Fitzgerald frequented during her spendthrift forays around New York City’s Palais Royale Hotel in search of the perfect evening dress. What she found, instead, was the legend and the fantasy of the still richly seductive coat, artfully displayed in a shimmer of late afternoon sunlight. And so the storied coat became her constant companion through bi-polar adventures played out over two continents and two decades, until both she and the coat began to unravel.
relics of deadly excess
burdened with fear
set fragile souls afire
