Leon Tefft
Author, Writer & Poet
The B-Side
I’m grateful to have two poems published in the April 2026 issue of Cattails, beginning with this tanka about new beginnings:
hands sowing soil
rich with the promise
of new life
remembering how it feels
to begin again
Cattails allows three haibun per submission. I sent in one I had high hopes for, then included a second, because you never know what might catch an editor’s eye. Surprisingly, it was the second that was accepted. As in the record industry, where a hit single is released, sometimes it’s the B-side that resonates.
Cancel culture always leads me back to George Santayana’s famous aphorism from The Life of Reason (1905):
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
And maybe those who intentionally erase the past deserve to repeat it.
Perhaps it’s cancel culture’s erasure of history that allowed this haibun to find its way into print. I can only speculate. The photo I included, Chris Murray’s image of the Blue Ridge Mountains bathed in their signature mist – that blue scattering of light through isoprene – makes the title’s origin seem apparent. But there was another blue light the Shenandoah is known for.
I could write a great deal about the inspiration behind “Blue Light in the Shenandoah” since I know more about the subject than perhaps 99.99% of the world’s population, but the clues within the poem are evident enough. I believe poetry should remain open to the reader’s interpretation, and haibun especially so. That is, after all, how we arrived here.
Blue Light in the Shenandoah
Manassas wind
once, only dogwoods
bled petals
The Shang Dynasty. Aztecs, Incas and Mayans. Celts and Vikings. Ancient Mesopotamians. Civilizations bound to gods, kings and deities. Blood spilled. Hearts torn from bodies. Souls burned alive. Appalling, yet accepted then, mere curiosities today. But they were people of their times, and times shape all people. We know because archaeologists unearth their relics and speak of their cultures long buried in history. But who speaks for the dead when they’ve been buried twice?
looming Wilderness
the sword I wield
in my soul
Click here to read the April 2026 issue of Cattails.
