Sticks and Stones

Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

In its March 2025 quarterly update theOxford English Dictionary added 42 new words from other languages. The words do not have direct English equivalents. The list includes gigil, from the Philippines, an intense feeling when seeing someone or something cute; blaa, from Irish English, a soft white-floured bread associated with Waterford, Ireland; and alamak, a Malaysian word expressing shock or outrage.

Simultaneously, hundreds of English words and phrases disappeared from U.S. Government documents. Many words erased from these documents relate to D.E.I. and transgender issues and initiatives. Forbidden words include: race, trans, intersectionality, Indigenous, tribal, ethnicity, activism, gender, pronoun, sociocultural, Black, female, disabled, and ally.

Where do these red strike-through words go?

hide-and-seek
woke words
doze under the tongue

Contemporary Haibun Online Issue #21.2  (August 2025)

Read the list here:
Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship – PEN America

The Man of the Hole

By Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

His hut hidden in the rainforest from outsiders, the last known member of an Amazonian tribe is found lying in his hammock covered in feathers. Decades earlier those greedy for the tribe’s land and resources murdered almost all his kin with poisoned sugar. Like a keepsake wedding suit, the funereal garb of brilliant bird feathers reflects planning and preparation, readiness and ritual. His death is a harbinger of the accelerating annihilation and disappearance of untold numbers of cultures and peoples—not unlike the mass extinction of other species—due to the cumulative effects of deliberative and systematic human activity.

gone
one by one  bye one
time flies

The Babylon Sidedoor  (October 2022) 

The Last Survivor of an Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Dies » Explorersweb
Last Member Of Indigenous Tribe Dies After Years Of Solitude