For the dverse prompt, a haibun about kindness.

Kindness is giving when the giving costs something—time, when it is short, cash, when it is tight. What else is there? A smile, a soft word, a hand to cross the road, a seat on the bus cost nothing. It’s part of being human, neither noteworthy nor praiseworthy.

Kindness was in the scores of people who lined the streets when first my father and then my mother were carried from the church to the graveyard on the same November day, ten years apart. A working day, like any other, people I didn’t know, whose names I had never heard, were there, with tears and bowed heads. Just to be there, to stand in the cold wind and wait, because it mattered.

On the bough, a rose

blooms, a bird sings, neither asks

payment in return.