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)
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| 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? 
1 comment:
Restlessness is at the end the worst vice, sit and wait.
PS. This is the pot calling the kettle black :-)
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