Hope is a pudding-wonderful thing
in the icebox beside the grilled chicken,
a summer’s day by another name
that gyres and struts its hour
across the wabe.

Hope. It won’t disappoint, since every atom
belonging to each mermaid in trousers rolled,
as good belongs to you and me
and all the petals in a metro station
at the butt-end of a universe less traveled.

difference
like leaves in the forest
half a league on

(This mash-up of a haibun presented with thanks and apologies to Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, St. Paul, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Douglas Adams, Robert Frost, and Lords Byron and Tennyson)