hair ties

When I first returned home from the hospital, I didn't really notice them. They were just a part of the normal clutter of home. Not something that needed my attention. But as the days moved on and I sunk back into my life – half the old and half the new – I started seeing them everywhere, and it made me uneasy. Eventually the snippets of tension they were creating, the cracks they were prising open within my coping, meant they had to go.

I went around the house collecting them, one by one, and putting them in a clear plastic bag. How did I ever need so many? One on my desk, one on the coffee table, one in the bathroom, one on the dresser, one by my bedside, one in my handbag...

I put them away in the back of a cupboard. It would be a good 18 months before I'd need one again.

the rain quickens

i should have known

there'd be tears

Contemporary Haibun Online, January 2013, vol 8, no 4

First published in Kokako 17 (September 2012)

By The Light

          the day after chemo
          he reads by the light
          of his cellphone

a handful of stones, Thursday, 24 November 2011

Tears in Ice Diver

            tears
            the doctor shifts
            in his seat




Commended, New Zealand Poetry Society International Haiku Contest 2011
Appeared in Ice diver, New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2011

Re-negotiating

          re-negotiating
          my drug regime
          with the doctors
          I tell them that today
          they may see me cry

paper wasp, volume seventeen, number 3, winter 2011

Tanka © Kirsten Cliff 2011

Photograph by Cameron Elliot

While I Have Chemo

          planning our wedding

          in the hospital chapel
          while I have chemo
          I am not dying
          but a part of me is

Presence #44 (June, 2011)

Tanka and photograph © Kirsten Cliff 2011 

A Vision of Birds

New ideas for creative projects seem to come to me no matter what mood I'm in nor where my energy levels are sitting. Some ideas can simply never be realised and have to be let go. Others just keep bubbling back up into my conscious awareness and need to be fulfilled.

          escaping

          from a 2nd-hand

          book

          two tickets for

          the bird gardens

The feeling of wanting to create something out of all the cards I was sent while in hospital last year can no longer be ignored. I have a vision of birds: of cutting each card into a bird silhouette and setting them on a background to be hung on the wall.

All the cards I was given during my time in hospital having IV
chemotherapy for leukaemia last year, from March to July, 2010.

I don't know how it's all going to work out but I'm willing to follow this vision and see where it leads! Will keep you updated :)