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.