We are the bookend sisters. I am Susan Lee Kerr, the eldest and the wordy one. She is Meg Kaczyk, the youngest (of 6 of us siblings) and the arty one. We each made our living by our art/craft, and now continue to practice. So of course I turned to her for the cover of my new haiku collection, Learning to Leave. As I did for the first one, The Walk Home. This time there’s more to the story.

Meg offered me four paintings she thought could work. Elegy, with its misted blues, greens and whites, its dashes of red, spoke to me right away. It looked like they might be prayer flags. That incidentally resonates with meaning between us because Meg was widowed two years ago, tall banner flags part of her Joe’s burial ceremony. Bookend sisters again, on journeys of care with our husbands.

But there’s more! This is a story with layers. Meg’s painting was based on her response to a poem. She says:

You can see how I work… I wrote my own notes on my response to the poem. The watercolor snippet was a piece from a sketchbook (the whole sketch was of a boat at a dock with festive flags). That system was how I arrived at abstraction.

And there, do you see it? The poem itself is in haiku form! It’s by Linda M. Robertson. For ease of reading I repeat it here:

Searching for you,
       the devoted sun comes first
                 to your bedroom window.

It is titled Elegy for Evan. Evan was Linda’s son, who died in a mountain climbing accident, Meg worked with Linda on a whole exhibition a few years ago. Meg has now written, and painted, her own book, uniquely beautiful and sensitive, Notes from Next to the Bed: a caregiving love story in words and pictures. For more on Meg, and Linda too, see Meg’s site here.

So, story within story within story, grief within grief within grief. As I say on the back cover of Learning to Leave, haiku (and here I add art-making) is a way. A way of life, a way through life. The 65 haiku in the collection catch living moments of the everyday over the last five years. For a free sampling watch this space, and jump here on this site. Or jump here to buy your very own copy, available only through me at present.