About Dad (poem)

My father studied clouds
but for months at a time
there were none.

At sundown he hung up his hat
and took off his boots.
He washed his face and hands.

Mum moved the hose and chopped the vegetables.
I fed the chooks and closed the gate
behind the last stupid bum.

Night rose from the east,
easing its purple cloth over the sky, in increments.
Later I lay on the lawn with my father.

He studied stars too—not their meanings or placement,
rather that they were there at all
like so many glittering grains of dust.

Rain came eventually
and the grass grew taller than men.
The cattle were sent to market and the bills paid.

All the children grew up, left home
and there were no more worries.
Perhaps that’s why

he didn’t wait long after that to die.
He’d finished his studies.
He’d paid his dues.

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Trees That I Love

casurina

The small Melaleuca trees in the dry Queensland bush – small, thin and bent like ageing jockeys. They have paper bark and scant yellow bottlebrush flowers. In a favourite haunt, there was one that I could climb when I was a thin-limbed pre-adolescent.

above black rocks
a child’s legs swing
magical thinking

At Blackheath boarding school, at the back of the sports field, the poinciana tree. Poincianas have such a beautiful umbrella shape and this was a good climbing tree. Someone had hoisted an old bed-base up there. It sagged like a hammock and was a good place for hiding from teachers when you were meant to be doing sport, and a good place for teenage dreaming.

vermillion flowers
against forever blue
we discuss boys

The pine trees at the bottom of our place, like guard trees. Growing underneath: daffodils, jonquils, ixias and daisies. Our children sat down there in spring with green light in their hair.

the grandchild
skirts around the monster
her mother’s rusted swing

The kids’ old tree feels like a family member. A very ancient stringy bark, it housed their swings and ladders, and the tree house that Dirk built, putting his back into it, his muscles and will, on the edge of manhood. The kids are adults now and it died in the drought three summers back.

a requiem of mist
for the old man tree
that our children climbed

There are many more trees that I could mention and it seems that they all involve dreaming. Time and cares dissolve into the gentle movement of leaves or the fatherly bulk of their trunks. Space appears between thoughts.

night tree
moonlight glints
on waxy leaves

black feathers

Cara was blind. She couldn’t see grain on the ground and would sometimes roost on a stone in the middle of the flat. But she must have had some sight, because she could get in the dog’s door and would wander into the kitchen, making that ‘Brrk, brrk,’ sound that hens make for greeting.

a shuffle
of black feathers
then a cackle
and there’s a warm brown egg
in the washing basket

(tanka published in Bright Stars, Volume 2)

electric storm

lightning flash
across the flat in puddles
a toad orgy

I really did witness a cane toad orgy one time. There were at least a hundred on the flats outside our home at Taemas (North Queensland), They were all jumping on each other. Some were five deep. They really didn’t look like they knew male from female.

lightning flash
the looming shapes
of trees

storm night
the charge of lightning
through my hackles

thunder
Mother and the dog
both tremble

These poems are inspired by a poem by Masaoka Shiki quoted (in a slightly different form at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai

lightning flash
through forest trees
a glimpse of water    (Shiki)

By the way…

Shiki is an amazing figure in the history of haiku. He modernised haiku at a time when it had become just clever word-play, puns and satire.

Among other things, he advocated for and used the technique of shasei or “sketch from life”, with open and natural writing that made minute observations of his surroundings, and created emotion in his work by manipulating and juxtaposing the images he found.

Swatting Mosquitoes
blood stains
on the war tale I’m reading

(Shiki translated by Watson)

It was Shiki who established the term ‘haiku’ for the 5-7-5 stand-alone poem. Prior to him it was called hokku and haikai but he rejected these terms because those terms had been used for centuries in the context of linked verse, renku.

song of longing (haibun)

across a wide land
the snaking path of the river
rainbow light

rocky outcrop
the body of an ancestor spirit
casts shade

First of all apologies. Apologies to every aboriginal person whose eyes I have avoided because I could not bear your pain, I could not bear what my people have done, are still doing, to your people. I am sorry. Even when I was a child I knew the great wells of sadness in your eyes and how they can change in an instant to humour, the depth of love there, the depth of grief. And I am sorry.

I grew up on Country. I don’t know whose Country, just that I loved it. It fed my body and my bones grew.

alone
in miles of bush
the dark haired child

pathless path
spinifex stings
on thin legs

Interesting that, though I knew nothing of aboriginal culture at the time, I knew there were places I should not go and places that welcomed my small female body with mother’s arms.

Dad showed me bora rings once. They were circles and paths edged with white stones amid the thin shade of lanky bush trees. We stood amongst them, where once ceremonies were performed, feet danced the earth, songs and clapsticks filled the air.

shimmering heat
just the whine of flies
amid stones

The whole area was dotted with stones. One could miss the bora rings. Dad said he and my brothers had ridden past for years not seeing. Perhaps the spirit of the land had accepted them enough to open their eyes.

The aboriginal people say the Dreamtime (creation) is not only some distant past, it is also now. Creation is still happening. It is why they must dance the totems of the animals, plants, birds, and earth. They must sing the paths of ancestor beings.

dust puffs
from black feet
rhythm sticks

Apparently the songlines cross the country. If one knows the song, one would never get lost on that unmapped path even though they extend thousands of kilometres across land never seen. And they must be sung.

I hope there is a songline from where I live now in South Australia to the North Queensland country of my youth because my heart sings the songs of both places and sometimes my eyes are sad for the other.

rolling hills and farmlands
my heart in the rocky places
of my youth

Carpe Diem #473, Creation 

Taemas at first

Willy willies across the red ridge, drought and heat swirling with dust and dry leaves. We were living in a caravan at the time. I don’t remember, but it must have been hot; it was summer after all.

thirst heat
on the canvas water bag
native bees

A canvas water bag was the only way we could cool our water when we first went to Taemas. The evaporation from the damp bag would cool the water. Of course, being a drought, there wasn’t other water for miles so insects would come to the bag: wasps, hornets and bees. The bees in that country at the time were the small native ones, stingless, but I didn’t know that. When I first saw them I ran away as if they were chasing me and came a cropper on the guy rope of the awning. So Dad took me back to the water bag and educated me in the ways of insects and the ones that bite.

teetering
on an ant hill
the lithe child

Dad and the boys were building the shed in which we were to live. I remember they backed the caravan into it, as a kitchen and my parent’s bedroom. It must have been hard for Mum, such chaos with seven mouths to feed.

red laminex table
five pairs of legs
swing

I went for a walk in that first week and after a while I heard voices calling my name. They didn’t know I was not lost. We were living on one hundred and forty square miles of land with only a one small paddock fenced. That’s a lot of land to lose a child in. But I came running up the hill when I heard them, and then Dad taught me ways to not become lost.

a child
flat backed on a warm rock
the high circles of eagles

. . . .

Note: thirst heat was written in answer to:

early morning gentle rain,
two big bumblebees
humming at their work
 © Jack Kerouac

for Carpe Deim Haiku Kai

For I Will Consider My Cats… (haibun)

For I Will Consider My Cat George. plaster and ink on canvas. © Belinda Broughton

a flurry of colour
freed, the crimson rosella
doesn’t look back

Sometimes, when I was a kid, birds would hit the side of our home and the cat would rush out there to catch it while it was stunned. So, every time we heard that thud, it was a race between me and the cat to see who could get there first — me to save the bird or the cat to eat it. Three times I got there just after the cat and prized her jaws apart, the bird flying free unharmed. But the fourth time, the cat clamped her jaws down on the bird, killing it instantly. I was angry with the cat and took the bird away anyhow. The cat just scowled.

We lived in remote North Queensland. I don’t know which feral cat she was making her pregnant, but maybe one we were responsible for.

box under the bed
the labouring cat
begins to purr

the rasp
of a cat’s tongue
wobbling kitten

Once she brought a wood duck up from the house-dam, a good kilometre away. It was bigger than her. She dragged it in for her kittens not yet three days old. There lay the duck, its feathers gleaming in the shadows of her nest while the kittens peered through half-opened eyes. She also brought in a goanna for them, huge and leathery and very much alive, in fact, still perfect because she couldn’t break its skin. Eventually it got away, running up the nearest tree to the outermost branch, the cat after it, both dropping to the ground, and away through the bush. She didn’t come back with it, so I suppose it won.

She took to having broods of kittens away down the paddock in some hollow log, but I was a tenacious child and would stalk her, a few more metres each day. She would change direction when she noticed me. But eventually I would find them and bring them back to the house.

She may have hated me, that cat.

flicking her tail
the cat
in a pink doll’s dress

Eventually she brought dingo poison back and vomited it up, her latest batch of kittens succumbing also, two older male cats locked away until it was all over. And that was the end of our addition to the feral cat population.

(artwork after: Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry] by Christopher Smart)

Crimson Rosella

inspired by:

at Ligo Haibun Challenge, which, this week is using two of my images. I was going to write something entirely different, but this is what came out. Maybe another day.

Taemas Homestead

When I was a kid in North Queensland, we lived in a shed. On three sides it didn’t have walls, just fly wire. On rare occasions it would get cold (like 20 C). Once we even had a little patch of mist that I ran down the hill to be in, before it was eaten by the sun. But mostly we had sun. Lots of it.

midday rest
my back on the concrete
for coolness

My Mum said her heart fell when she first saw the dry red ridge where my Dad had sited the homestead. But it didn’t take long for her to find the beauty, low blue hills in the east, the colours at twilight. And it wasn’t long before she had some comforts, a plumbed shower, a hose to hold in the morning before the heat came up. And the shed. She knew how to eke beauty from pretty much anything.

morning posy
she snips the ends of cosmos
in cool water

Before My father made canvas curtains for the walls, storms were interesting. all the beds, tables, and chairs would be shoved into the centre of the one big room and covered with tarpaulins. The wind would blow and the thunder thump and we would shelter in the strongest part of the shed. I even spent a number of nighttime storms in my bed under a tarp.

lightning, thunder
misty coolness
on my face

It was meant to be a temporary shelter but they lived in it until they retired and went to live in the nearest town 80 miles away. It was the happiest time of their lives.

last day
she holds the hose and gazes
at low blue hills

 

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Carpe Diem #454, midday nap

The Dig

When we first went to Taemas, we had neither money nor water, so we had to have a hole-in-the-ground loo. My father sited it on the edge of the ridge behind the house. Digging it was a major undertaking. The Boys (as we collectively called my father and brothers) attacked it like the beginnings of an archaeological dig. A hole, one and a half metres square, that went straight down. All they unearthed was limestone rocks.

breaking stone
to find the critters
a child geologist 

white rock
the child finds
sand dollars

They were up to their hips when they hit rock. Solid limestone. But there is some crazy streak of determination in my family, so they kept digging.
Dad said, ‘It would be good to know the strata of the soil.’
Soil it wasn’t, they broke rock for another two metres. Goodness knows what they wanted to find.
‘Oh, well,’ said Dad, ‘at least we won’t fill it up for a while.’ But the very first wet season it filled up to the level of the rock and never drained. It didn’t matter; it saw us out.

Dad and Dave (not kidding, that was their names) built a three-sided tin shed around it, with a canvas for a door. Not that there was anyone in any direction to see, so when the poddy calf sheltered there to escape the rain, and ate the door, it didn’t matter. We had the best view of any toilet.

on the loo
a small child
humming

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Haibun Thinking: Week 2 – January 28th 2014