Special Feature Collaborative Poem--By Marianne Szlyk--United States and Angelee Deodhar--India

Haibun : Mugunghwa

Haibun text by Marianne Szlyk
Haiku by Angelee Deodhar

One summer, just after she took out the lilac bushes to appease my aunt, my grandmother planted a Rose of Sharon, Hibiscus Syriacus  tree in the front yard. My brother and I called it the Stick of Sharon because it was just a stick—no leaves, no branches, no flowers. The Nashua River flowing through downtown was more colorful, turning red, yellow, or green, depending on the dyes used at the mill that day.

The next summer Gram sold the house and moved out to the country with us.

Every so often I Google her old address. Only two houses remain on Avon Place, a dead-end street less than a mile from downtown and the once-colorful river that will someday be clean enough to swim in. My grandmother’s house is green now—and the Rose of Sharon, almost the size of the other trees, flourishes. And the lilac bushes have grown back. 

patch of sun
a chameleon rises through
autumn leaves

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Notes--Hibiscus syriacus the national flower of South Korea is named mugunghwa in Korean. The flower's symbolic significance stems from the Korean word mugung, which means "eternity" or "inexhaustible abundance".

"Rose of Sharon" originally appeared as a prose poem in the anthology Tic-Toc by Kind of a Hurricane Press and in my chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking Up at Trees of Heaven.