Love on Bleecker Street/A Valentine Haibun

🏈HALF❤️TIME 🏈

A haibun is a literary device which originated in Japan and which combines prose writing with haiku. The reactions to this past Sunday's half-time show inspired me to write this haibun. 

    The stir caused by Bad Bunny’s all Spanish performance at the Super Bowl continues to ring in my ear. The vitriol expressed by some people juxtaposed with Bad Bunny’s joyous gambol made me think of my grandmother, my father’s mother, sitting on her chair by the tenement window, her hands folded, quietly listening  to my childish prattle, nodding and smiling though she didn’t understand a word of what I said.  Once my younger cousin recited the whole, long, from beginning to never-ending-end of The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Tennyson. Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left. Onward. Onward rode the six hundred (and my cousin's dramatic recitation). While my teenage eyes rolled through each new stanza, my grandmother’s smile never left her face. That's how I learned that the  spoken word is only one form of communication.

                                                    Smiling in her chair.

                                                    my sweet Italian grandma

                                                    listened with her heart. 

In this month of hearts and chocolate, what are some ways of showing love without speaking? Why not write a haibun?