Lichen, ant, frog and whipbird

 

When  I walked into the Kedumba valley in winter with my companion, I wrote one decent haiku about the kangaroos. I scribbled a lot of other things  in my notebook, including this:

effort

old wire, fenceposts

cattlegrids

lichen lazes on it

We’d seen the Maxwell’s farmhouse with its hand-milled timbers. There were more signs of life on the land on the road going down the valley.  I’ve just waited and then moved the words  around  a bit, like you’d move stones to form a pleasing pattern, maybe those stones that were beside the river.

Such effort

old fenceposts and wire –

lichen lazes on it

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Recently I led a group of walkers from the Blue Mountains Conservation Society out to a ridge on King’s Tableland overlooking the Burragorang valley. What a view! These walkers are botanically literate. In flower we saw waratahs (below), Conospermum, two types of Daviesia, Dillwynia, Pomaderris, Patersonia (iris), Gompholobium, Scaevola, Pultenaea, and Comesperma.

 When I was out doing the reconnoitre, before the walk, I wrote this haiku:

Round sandy doorway

on the quiet road –

hullo ant!

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Spring – frantic activity in the plant, bird and human world. In my garden, I’ve been doing my fire preparations, which means tidying things up, chucking out junk, trimming, pruning, mulching. Hmmm – that tank is leaning like the tower of Pisa and no longer meets the downspout. Time to drain it out and rebuild the tower of pallets which it stands on. After some days of refilling the watering cans over and over again, I could take the tank down off the stand, but there was still something inside ….’scuse me, Basho, I just have to sample your best-known haiku…

The empty tank

a frog jumps out –

blink!

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I went for a walk with my zen companions, up Jack's track near St. Albans. We began the walk in the Macdonald valley (below), and the track followed a creek upwards. In that darkish creek cool, a whipbird was audible and unusually, visible. I once described their call, in another poem, as being like" a bullet through honey". I have since learned that there are two birds that make up what sounds to us like one call. A second bird makes the whipcrack at the end. So it is a duet, a conversation. But on this smokey Saturday morning, the bird was alone. I wrote:

Talks to itself -
makes up a
whipbird haiku

And they were way better than mine!