Diana jumps into haiku: The mist, the rain

The mist, the rain

When a walking day in spring is forecast to bring “light showers”, leap from your bed! On Saturday it was only a small contingent of Conservationists who dragged themselves from beneath the warm doona, for my walk to Lion Head. We all agreed, on this walk, that it’s been a very cold winter. We thought it might be the extremes of temperature (which are not reflected in an average), or else the solidly low temperatures of June and July.

The visual world has many moods when the air is damp. Okay, it was cold, being spring. But we’re used to that now, and can bear it for the promise of summer. And spring is typically a time for many flowers – like my favorite.

Boronia floribunda

I was the leader, so I didn’t write any haiku this time. Finding the way, being aware of time, being the leader is more than enough to concentrate on. But when I walked the track last August I did write this.

wattle blowing

on the edge of a cliff -

my hat flicks back

Will I ever get sick of sunshine wattle?

It is so cheerful, so tough, so bright in the cold last days of winter, when everything seems hard - rising into the cold, the laborious layering on of clothes, the constant need for food, colds and flu, the torrent of idiocy from those currently in power. But I haven’t yet written a haiku about sunshine wattle that stands on its own.

We had a lot of time to just look, and linger – the colours of the heath vegetation out there on King’s Tableland was vivid. We’ve finally had a good dumping of rain in the last few weeks.

There are never many birds out in wet weather, though a few honeyeaters in the banksia, and we heard a grey shrike-thrush. Lingering on the rock outcrop, somebody noticed a steady trickle of birds coming from the north. Honeyeaters!

Harold said,

I knew it was migrating because it had a suitcase under a wing.

And the spring flowers! There is a wealth of knowledge in the Conservation Society. On this walk our resident botanist said that there are no true flowering seasons in Australia, things tend to flower opportunistically. Longer warmer days, rain, opportunity knocks, here’s what is out!

Dampiera stricta

Dillwynia

Comesperma ericinum

Hakea

On last year’s yatra to Lion Rock, it was not only windy but the cicadas were emerging. As there had been three seasons of plentiful rain before 2013, they were in great numbers. After about eight drafts, I wrote this:

dazed cicadas

crash-land into bushes –

the spring wind

Do you recognise these three rock outcrops? In the 1880’s they were called the Tri Saxa ( from the Latin saxum meaning stone or rock).

Tourists flock to the mountains to see ‘the Three Sisters’, bring their much-needed tourist dollar, fill the cafes and hotels and the main street of Leura. They might go away with the impression that there is an ‘Aboriginal’ legend about three beautiful girls from one tribe, and wrong love, and an intertribal battle, and the girls being turned to stone to protect them. But that is wrong. By the twenties, the rocks had been personified as sisters. The legend came about when a newspaper ran a competition, and an imaginative girl made it up and won the prize. Mel Ward repeated the story ad infinitum in the thirties. It’s a pity that things get skewed like this. There is a Gundungurra story about the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades (a constellation of stars), but I’ll leave others to tell it.