Kin
Roger Jones
 

My genealogist cousin Dave asks me to come along on a trip. I'm twenty, jobless, and out for the summer -- why not? In the Ozarks, we travel back roads, through green hills and bluffs. In numerous country cemeteries, we tromp among tombstones, squinting to find the mossy, eroded names, dates and epitaphs of family. Soon, suffering in the intense mid-day August heat, we pull over by the county highway, crash down through waist-high weeds, and kick off our shoes. Then we slosh out shin-deep into a mountain stream whose name we don't know.

rushing water --
a large black stone
splits the flow

Roger Jones teaches creative writing at Texas State University. His tanka, haiku and haibun have appeared recently or are scheduled to appear soon in Frogpond, Stylus Poetry Journal, American Tanka, Modern Haiku, Heron's Nest, Sierra Nevada College Review and Simply Haiku.

Copyright 2007: Simply Haiku