Spring ginko

My third Cloudcatchers’ haiku ginko - autumn, winter, now spring.

We meet at a picnic table by the lake - eight or nine of us. Average age 65-70. I feel like a young spunk.

Several of the women have brought home-made biscuits in plastic lunch boxes. We all have our sun hats. They chat about a funeral and about who won various haiku competitions.

Their conversation is threaded-through with quoted, memorised haiku -  their own, eachothers’. Like small cherished objects, handed around.

We have an hour to wander about in silence gathering sensory data for haiku. Trying to engage the non-visual senses ( I close my eyes, suddenly notice the cool water-smelling breeze, birdsong, distant traffic)

surf club kiosk

The wide  ti-tree lake, fringed with paperbark is pale grey, peaceful. Across the road, the ocean beach is hot and harsh and loud. I spend a moment standing in the sand by the surf club, then retreat back to the banksia-shaded lakeside where willy wagtails flutter on the grass in dappled light. 

There is an elderly man in a motorised wheel chair parked by the lake. I’m aware of him in my peripheral vision several metres away as I watch six cute ducklings swimming and preening and shaking their feathers.  As if they’re in a chldren’s song.

I’m hoping for inspiration, something simple yet profound. Then I’m just watching the ducklings

'They were born right over there', the white-haired man volunteers, pointing to a shady place near the water’s edge about six weeks ago. I know every bird that lives around this lake. And the lizards too - have you seen the lizards?’ 

A moment later a water dragon scuttles onto a branch overhanging the water.

‘What are you writing in your book?’, he asks ‘I’m as deaf as a post  - you’ll have to write your answer for me.’

He comes here every day, he loves this place. He radiates some sort of happiness, just to be here. 

could i envy

the stillness

of an old deaf man in a wheelchair?

lake edge 

duck gobbles

at ripples in clouds

shall i sit and wait

for haiku

- or go searching? 

shooting the breeze

I met the Cloudcatchers this morning down in the park by the creek, for the Autumn Gingko. It felt more like winter. About twelve of us, in our raincoats, with our notebooks stood around in the picnic shelter. Mild-mannered, mostly middle-aged and older folk. 

Introductions, friendliness...Relaxing, to be with older people sometimes: everyone’s long ago given up trying to be cool... Rain was plick-placking intermittently on the corrugated iron roof after a recent  downpour. 

A woman made a brief formal acknowledgement of traditional indigenous owners of the land. Then chief Cloudcatcher ( & award-winning haiku writer) Quendryth explained, for the benefit of us newies, what we do on a gingko. Which is: spend a while mooching around in the vicinity, taking note of images  & other sensory data. In silence. (Q is about four feet tall, a retired school teacher, in a bright red jacket. I bet her students loved her.)

After collecting our data, we gather back to the picnic shelter table, spend a little more time cobbling together  rough drafts of  haiku. Then we share our new-born half-formed poems, reading in turns  around the 

table

waiting for haiku

raindrops fall

on my words

pen poised 

i stand

before the tree 

tyre on rope 

hangs empty

over winter river

dead tree roots

cling to air

where creek bank used to be

old man

pauses by

empty playground

creek reflections

- raindrops ripple circles

in clouds

suburban creek

murmurs  memory

of wildness

Afterwards we adjourn to the terrace of the Bangalow Hotel for lunch, some glasses of wine, and gentle conversations about art and nature and literature. The two blokes sitting opposite me have the look of old survivors. One has a marked limp and walks with a stick; the other is pallid and quite elderly - but someone tells him he's looking better than he was. Two old poets, it seems.

The woman sitting next to me is a poet too, from Nimbin. She and the man across the table are passing a paper  napkin back and forth between them, writing alternating couplets of a nonsense verse. 

The elderly poet - I’m trying to imagine what he looked like younger, has bright, kind eyes - says he has some cause for optimism. Nature writing is on the rise, he says. He writes the name of a  nature writing blog on a piece of lined paper, in a spidery script, and presses it into my hand as we leave an hour later.  

He says his father started the Salvation Army citadel in Mullum. The other poet’s father jumped off a slow-moving freight train in Casino to start a new life, or escape from an old one. Or was it Newcastle? These people have space in their lives for yarns and musings and poetry. How sweet, how calming to my frenzied mind to drop into the world of the Cloudcatchers for a moment.

autumn wind

autumn haiku

autumn wind

final frangipani flower

falls

after the rainstorm

clouds move across

sunlit puddles

last week's summer beach towel

still hangs on

this week's winter verandah