Bio
Bob Lucky is a regular contributor to haiku and tanka journals in the US, Europe, and Australia, whose work has been widely anthologized. His works in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous international journals, including Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, The Prose-Poem Project, The Boston Literary Magazine, Haibun Today, and Contemporary Haibun Online (where he edits content). Lucky's chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, entitled Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. He now lives and works in Saudi Arabia.
Bob Lucky
Let the Tree of Life
die, we said. There's no hope. The leaves have curled into themselves. Brittle embryos of broken dreams.
The aquifer is dry. Clang of coins rattling down one drain or another. Let it die, we said. Give us
a chance. Not even a buzzard dares perch on a branch now. Burn it. Shed a little light on anything that's left.
Make a space for another seed. Give us a chance. The wind was
blowing birds into the dusk. We looked around. Noticed we were alone, talking to ourselves.
No one knew how to start a fire. We let the Tree of Life shelter us one more night.