Vox Populi
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Betsy Sholl: Haibun | Tarantula
Coming back from a church mission trip, a kid sneaked the creature through Customs in his boot. Smug, until his mother shrieked, and called my husband to pick it up. Thus, we became owners of a new venomous pet. What else could we do—send it back? set it free? It lived in a glass tank in the downstairs bathroom, the warmest room in the house. Especially at night, under a dim light it would lift then lower one leg at a time, slow motion aerobics, jailhouse weights. Like the scrawny kid we told our daughter she could not date, whose bloodied bat and steel-toed boots landed him in prison. There he bulked up and, of all things, signed on for poetry class, nodding at the irony of now dating me every Tuesday afternoon for fourteen weeks. He said little at first, then one day mused over the twisting vines of the tattoo he thought unique, until in jail he saw it was just like all the others. Was that the moment of his molt? Our creature, named Slash, also bulked up. He had a taste for crickets we fed each week, emptying a small paper bag of chirps into the tank, then listening as day by day the singing diminished. In that class, at least, it went another way. The inmates swallowed poems and sang back. A young man, in for life, wrote of his sealed window, how late at night, when only a few cars passed in the distance, and the prison fields and long drive were still, he could lean there and in that quiet smell the moonlight.
A carapace left
on the bottom of the cage
something soft steps out
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Copyright 2025 Betsy Sholl
Betsy Sholl was poet laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011 and has authored nine collections of poetry. Sholl has received several poetry awards, including the 1991 AWP Award, and the 2015 Maine Literary Award, as well as receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission.
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Beautiful, meanings within meanings to be appreciated and absorbed slowly as we step out from “the bottom of the cage.”
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Yes, the prose and the haiku complement each other beautifully.
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Betsy, you are amazing! I love what bubbles out of you! 🙋♀️🩷🌹
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I’m not always sold on this form–but WOW. Betsy shows how it’s done!
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She really does.
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Just to say Betsy I loved this one. “Something soft steps out” was so perfect.
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A remarkable haibun. The prose is unafraid, pressing into what Baldwin called “the questions in the answers,” and that haiku is the perfect, precise, razor-sharp image of the whole complex. Brava! And yes, it is God’s work, teaching in prison, and rewarding in ways that teach the teacher. Thank you, Betsy, for the poem, and Michael for publishing it.
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Thank you so much. Hope you are well and thriving–maybe thriving is part of the resistance, the energy we need to keep going.
Greetings to you and Kathy!
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Thank you, Richard, for being part of our community! Your comments here are always perceptive and encouraging.
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A lovely poem which conjured up a memory which I depicted in my graphic novel and which I’ll try to relate here: When I was in a minimum security prison in Safford, Arizona, in the early 1990s, I lived in a Quonset hut; there were four of them side by side, half-buried soup cans squatting there like tombstones just a coupe hours north of the actual infamous Tombstone. And in the no-man’s land between huts there was a single tree outside my window that was occasionally visited by a peregrine falcon. At first I wanted to tell everybody–show it off as my way of preening in place where popular preening was ubiquitous; picture buffed and shaved torsos covered in epidermally-deep blue Nazi regalia mounted on stick legs because pecs and biceps were as visual as skin color and that’s all that really mattered. But I wisely decide against it because, I reasoned, they would try to capture it or kill it or feed it a candy bar an so no, damn it, this was for me and, of course, the falcon.
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Sorry for the dismal grammar, but it’s early here and the first day of classes and I’m running late and, like one of my spanking new freshman comp students I’ll be meeting presently, proofed after posting.
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No problem, Matt. I always have a lower standard for the quality of the prose in my comments than I do for the main posts themselves. I think we can tolerate an error here and there.
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I love this parable of the falcon. Thanks, Matt.
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Sending this to Jim Hornsby Moreno who taught poetry in juvenile hall for years.
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Thanks, Barb.
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Thank you, Michael and everybody for responding to my poem. Yes, God’s work.
And a privilege to be in that space of shared trust and respect. Especially when the culture wants to deny our equal humanity.
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Bravo Betsy, and thank you. And I agree with Michael that working with incarcerated people is, indeed, God’s work.
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Another stunning Betsy Sholl poem. Brava!
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Brava!
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Yikes! Again the combination of your precise rendering of uncomfortable detail, and the compassion of your poet’s heart. What a journey. Beautiful use of the haibun form. Thanks.
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What a beautiful post, in every dimension. Communing with prison folk is necessary to spiritual development. Our Foundation sent me to our local prison for first time offenders, generally a younger population and they had to write and apply for my class. One learns there aren’t simply good people outside, and these bad people inside, but that every population has its good and bad and people make mistakes. Everyone is afraid of something, one of the best writers was a young man who’d done something so terrible (it was said), He would be there his whole life.
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I adore the Haibun after Betsy, all of it of such a penetrating and lovely sensibility. My granddaughters in Washington State have a tarantula named Taco. Household danger to fraternize with, be responsible for, and my first thought was why did their parents want to go there? And now I see the notion owns many legs…
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Meeting with incarcerated people is God’s work, Sean. Thank you.
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