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"Dua for America" (ink on paper, 2020) by Faisal Mohyuddin

This week’s prompt is inspired by a 俳文 (haibun) from Elsewhere: An Elegy by Faisal Mohyuddin

I’m happy to share the prose poem “The River. The Beckoning. The Chandeliers,” a haibun by poet Faisal Mohyuddin, from his beautiful collection, Elsewhere: An Elegy, which was published last year by independent press Next Page Press in San Antonio, Texas. Hurray for small presses!

Here’s what Next Page says about Faisal Mohyuddin’s book:

Elsewhere: An Elegy meditates on the complexities of loss, on how private and everlasting the weight of grief can be. Moving between short fragmented “answers” to the same lingering question, deconstructed haibun, and dream sequences, the speaker in Elsewhere: An Elegy cannot but help see himself as his own father, and his infant son as his own young self. He admits, “I’ve still not divined / how to unhusk this steadfast / grief from my poems.” Ultimately, he comes to recognize that the most healing way to grieve is to give, is to translate loss into generosity, pain into poetry.”

Indeed. Here’s a photo of Faisal:

And his bio from his website:

​​FAISAL MOHYUDDIN is a writer, artist, and educator. The child of immigrants from Pakistan, he is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (forthcoming spring 2024 from Next Page Press) and of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, (Eyewear, 2018), which won the 2017 Sexton Prize in Poetry, and was selected as a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society and named a "highly commended" collection of the year by the Forward Arts Foundation; it went on to receive an Honorable Mention in the Association of Asian American Studies 2020 Book Award for Poetry. Faisal is also the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone Press, 2017). His work has received Prairie Schooner's Edward Stanley Award, a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize from the Illinois State Library, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. His recent work appears in Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, Kweli, The Margins, Pleiades, Chicago Quarterly Review, and RHINO. An alumnus of the U.S. Department of State's Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program, Faisal is a graduate of Carleton College, Northwestern University, and Columbia College Chicago. An educator adviser and master practitioner for the global-not-for-profit Narrative 4, he teaches high school English in suburban Chicago and creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University. (Author photo by Wendy Alas / @wendyalasphotography)

Below is a photo I took today of my copy of his book, an image of the page of epigraphs, an image of the poem, the prompt (a suggestion, an encouragement), and then a definition of haibun.

First, the book! The cover features Faisal’s lovely painting, "My Father's Songs."

Here are the two epigraphs that open the book, by Matthew Kelsey, “a Chicago poet and actor,” and Sham-E-Ali Nayeem, “Author of the poetry collection, City of Pearls (UpSet Press 2019), Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is a Hyderabadi Muslim American poet, interdisciplinary artist and recovering social justice lawyer.” I wasn’t familiar with Matthew Kelsey until writing this post, but I have been an admirer of the acclaimed Sham-E-Ali Nayeem for many years.

Here is the gorgeous, enchanting poem “The River. The Beckoning. The Chandeliers” that unfolds as we move into it—in some ways like a “one-camera shot,” a continuous take on a ghostly camera dolly, flowing through space and time, and in other ways like quick cuts from one scene to the next, the energy coming from the juxtaposition.