Haiku on a Park Bench

He writes the haiku the way he learned to fold shirts, careful, quiet, trying not to waste anything. The park is a wide green bowl holding sound. A swing squeals. Someone’s portable speaker leaks a song through cheap bass. A dog barks at a pigeon like the pigeon owes him money.

His daughter is a small hurricane in pink sneakers, inventing games with strangers, turning the playground into a kingdom where the rules change every minute. She climbs, drops, laughs, disappears behind a slide, reappears with a stick held like a wand. Every so often she looks back, checking that he is still there, and he lifts his hand, a flag that says yes, I’m here, I’m here.

He has a notebook that used to be for work meetings. The first pages are full of bullet points and half-truths, words meant to sound productive. After that, the pages go blank, like the notebook got tired of pretending. Now he writes in the margins with a pen that keeps skipping, ink catching only when it feels like it.

He is not trying to be a poet. He is trying to be present. The haiku is a small fence he builds around a moment so it doesn’t run away.

He watches her chase bubbles another parent blows into the sun. The bubbles lift, wobble, take the light on their thin skins, then pop, clean and sudden. His daughter claps as if the popping is applause for her.

He counts without moving his lips. Five, then seven, then five again. He wants the syllables to fit like stones in a pocket, something you can carry without thinking about it.

When he’s done, he reads it once, then closes the notebook like a secret.

His daughter runs up and presses her sweaty forehead to his knee. “What you doing?”

He looks at the page, then at her face, bright with dirt and joy. “I wrote something small,” he says. “To remember today.”

She doesn’t ask to see it. She just takes his hand and tugs him toward the swings, and the poem stays in the notebook, warm as bread, while he goes to be written into the rest of the afternoon.

Haiku:
Bubbles in sunlight
your laughter pulls me forward
ink dries on my hand