Commentary on “Birthday Lunch at the Cubee Pub”My commentary on Joanna
Preston’s haibun first appeared in Modern Haibun and Tanka Prose
#1, Summer 2009, page 168. Originally written in April of 2009, commissioned by MHTP editor Jeffrey Woodward.
Birthday Lunch at the Cubee Pub This place burnt down the year
she was born. Built again in brick and no time. We’ve hired the back room for
her birthday lunch, dressed her in cherry red, sat her by the fire. The new
owners had it stoked up long before we arrived, stood at the door smiling as we
made the slow way across from the car in the sun. Winter in the Wheatbelt feels
like summer to me. But she is always cold now, as though already underground.
She is twig and husk, a frond of bracken curled in on itself. Feather snagged
on a brittle stem. Cirrus cloud teased to thread by the wind. Tomorrow, she will not wake up, and we will take turns not saying
what we’re thinking.
102 today— only strangers wish Many Happy Returns
—Joanna Preston
As is common for haibun, Joanna Preston’s is written in the present tense. Yet,
in its brief second paragraph, it takes an unusual twist. It knows the future,
and that future immediately casts a pall on us as readers. We know what will
happen, but we dwell in the present of celebrating the birthday of a beloved
centenarian who is about to die. It’s her last hurrah, and through the magic of
words, we know what the characters in the story do not yet know. Remember the
bestselling book Love Story? Its very first sentence tells you that the
main character dies in the end. That simple device is useful because it deflates
what could have otherwise been a maudlin ending to the book. It also gives
every unfolding event throughout the book added tension and context. What
Joanna does here is different, because we do not know the key detail in the
first paragraph. But we do know it before we read the concluding haiku, and
that fact changes how we apprehend the poem. It gives the concluding poem an
irony in that those who are not strangers do sense that the end is near
after all. Perhaps that’s an easy assumption regarding a person who is more
than 100 years old, yet it’s not an assumption made by strangers. This haibun
is unique for the way it plays with time, and unique for the interesting effect
that its time-play has on the reader. We are chilled, too, in the realization
that perhaps even the centenarian also knows that her end is near, for she is
always cold. Even the cirrus clouds are reduced to barest threads by that
chilling wind from the future.
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