For the NaPoWriMo prompt, a warning to myself. A haibun followed by the erased poem.

Is it peace that falls in the green shadows with the trickling music of the birds that draws my steps deeper among the trees where sunlight flickers and wing-shapes flit? Is this where the key is hidden, beneath the heads of orchids, wild and strange, to open the final door? Feet tread, grass-swishing and bending stalks, deeper and further from the path, the road, the wide world.

I think I could live here, curl around myself like the foxes do and the winter squirrels

and all would be well, easy and without care. But in the patter of the rain, the damp where water spiders scurry and the cold that creeps from flesh to bone, I hear the sound of need, the cry to come back, the pulling in of…