For Sherry’s prompt over at Real Toads, Homecoming. We are to write about the nostalgia of lost faces, lost loves, gone places. She offers up one of my favorite songs by the Beatles. I am using it for my haibun here. As the new usual I am writing in the old abbreviated form of the original haibun by Basho. this one is rather long – 98 words.
Bitter Kisses
When I was a child I pulled green blades of a daffodil still wet with rain. I wanted to see how it tasted. I placed the green blade between my lips – slowly pulling using my tongue to feel the sharp edge of the bitter green blade. Years later after kendo, my lover and I stood in the rain and kissed. He had daffodil lips. I drank in their cool wetness and my tongue probed the sharp edges of his teeth and the slightly bitter taste of his lips.
hot kisses –
bitter daffodils –
love withered away
kanzen sakura 
Dec 06, 2018 @ 15:53:35
This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing 🙏
Dec 06, 2018 @ 16:10:11
Thank you
Dec 06, 2018 @ 16:25:45
My pleasure 😊
Dec 06, 2018 @ 16:06:37
A gorgeous haibun memory, Toni – I love the way you describe your lover’s daffodil lips and the haiku is superb!
Dec 06, 2018 @ 16:09:46
Thank you Kim. It felt too painful today to write about my mother and Christmases past. I picked a memory that only brings a few tears.
Dec 06, 2018 @ 16:17:57
I so understand that.
Dec 06, 2018 @ 18:25:34
A never-to-be-forgotten lover with daffodil lips……..what a wonderful poem this is. I especially love the haiku, the essence of bittersweet memories. Wonderful, Toni.
Dec 06, 2018 @ 20:24:51
Thank Sherry. Thank you for the prompt.
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Dec 07, 2018 @ 00:31:17
Wonderful insight, Toni, nicely written. A wrongful lover will never be forgotten. Like the sword wound, it heals but the mind remembers. Even when out of mind, it still recalls.
..
Dec 07, 2018 @ 01:06:40
Wow! Such a mesmerizing haibun, with the childhood memory drawn in parallel with another one from adulthood, both innocent and beautiful in their experience and light. And the heartbreak making it so very poignant. The daffodil image works wonders here. Wonderful writing, Toni.
Dec 07, 2018 @ 10:35:21
This is gorgeous writing. I could read the first two sentences again and again for all of time. Okay. Maybe that’s hyperbole. 😉
A book should begin that way — with that opening.
Dec 07, 2018 @ 11:10:49
Wow. Thank you so very much for your kind comment. I actually have been writing about this for several years.
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Dec 08, 2018 @ 09:09:01
You worked wonders in shifting emotions each line of the haiku.
Dec 08, 2018 @ 09:30:12
Excellent haibun and haiku Toni.