Along the wooded backbone of Penwood Park, just before descending to Lake Louise, are a couple dozen cairns gathered on a low rocky rise. Surrounded by mountain laurel, chestnut oak and pine, the stacks of angular traprock chunks are pillar-like, triangular, pyramidal, in thin spires, and laid horizontally. Some are fitted among tree limbs. Abstract sculpture or small stone city, they beckon to the imagination.
Constructing memories, passersby leave a presence connecting the hand, eye, and spirit to the land’s lasting reality. Is it a monument, waymark, or memorial? What primal instinct moves us to leave bits of ourselves tucked among the ancient pieces of basalt? I find a letter to a lost brother, the photo of a favorite dog, rosary beads, a tiny bamboo cross, and a note too faded to read.
braille read in piled rocks
mailbox to eternity
hands love holding stones
(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku. It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre. Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination. To travel the entire New England Trail with 90 haibun go to https://www.ctwoodlands.org/blue-blazed-hiking-trails/half-million-footsteps-journey-through-poetry-the-new-england-trail)
The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border. The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts. For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/
