WEA - first ginko at Botanic Gardens

Farm Cove 

Walking through Chinatown on my way to teach the  WEA class, people are eating breakfasts which smell like dinner. I pass a restaurant called “Eating World”. After the theory part of class, we make our way to Circular Quay.  I try to imagine the beginnings of English settlement here, in this tight curve of bay – I’ve been reading “The Fatal Shore” by Robert Hughes. Over in the next bay where we're going, the settlers attempted to grow their food. Nowadays it’s the gracious foreshore of the Botanic Gardens.

Farm Cove now:

a catamaran

girls shrieking on deck

I gather my students in a grove of bamboo, where we’re a little sheltered from the cold wind. Shelley had remembered from the morning - “Learn about ….a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant”. Basho

party music

the winds swallows

a chunk of it

The poets walk around writing – they walk slowly. I wander over to a man who is harvesting some kind of fruit from a tree. He is African. He tells me that this tree is a relative of the coffee plant, and that its young leaves if chewed are good for …was it arthritis? He tells me the name and I write it down – its common name is khat ( who knows if that is the right spelling). I have a taste, it's almost fruity.

I wish the poets would walk faster. Then I could warm up.

cold again

my arms in this thin jacket

leaden October

But there are so many delights, not the least of which is people-watching. Graham wrote a senryu ( satirical take on human affairs) about a woman we saw at Circular Quay. Here are my senryus:

in pink gumboots

running to the next puddle

Mummmeeeeeee!

a bare shoulders display -

flicked back by the cold wind,

her hair

Is this a senryu, below, or a haiku? I’m not sure.

one minute detour...

given to

the Asian gardens

Only one minute? 
We had two rounds of sharing our work. The best was the sharing in the café, with cake and hot chocolate and tea. So that’s what they were thinking about! This was my best effort:

lotuses arise

from stinking black mud

moorhen is at ease