Raining again, and turning cold too after what has so far been a very mild winter. Still, we had time this morning to rake a mess of leaves off the garden and on to the lawn for Haiku Teenager to mow over and throw into the leaf mould bins. Haiku Husband pruned the hydrangeas down to the ground and I set to and weeded the new garden.
We’re all on holiday this week but decided on a “stay-cation” when we saw the weather forecasts – not nice anywhere in the North Island all week. Today’s treat was High Tea at a local, smart hotel. As we left Haiku Husband suggested I should recommend it only to people I didn’t like! So, as nobody here qualifies for that appellation, I shall instead recommend High Tea at Chateau Tongariro and High Tea at Zealong Tea Estate near Hamilton, the former more traditional, the latter more innovative with its use of tea-flavoured food – and both delicious!
Here are some haiku to whisk us away to sunnier climes and warmer times …
galapagos
all the umbrellas proceed
at the same pace
– Greg Piko (Australia), Modern Haiku 37:2, 2006
afternoon breeze
the pace of paddle boats
in the park
– Ben Moeller-Gaa (US), The Heron’s Nest XV:3, 2013
green and black lizard
curled in a stone nostril:
summer in Rome
– Sandra Simpson, winterSPIN, 1995
reef sharks
the black eye
of the hibiscus
– Sandra Simpson, Simply Haiku 4:4, 2006
And a senryu to end on …
After pushing the lawnmower at noontime, the simple taste of water is satisfying
– Anon, from Gardeners’ Pioneer Story (Southern California Gardeners Federation, 2007)
The book’s editor, Sankyaku (Sunny) Seki, spoke about senryu at last year’s Haiku North America conference in Long Beach, California. The book is about the senryu of the Japanese gardeners who at one time dominated as domestic gardeners in Los Angeles and what the poems reveal about their lives through the 20th century from 1907. It was originally published (in Japanese) in Rafu Shimpo, a Japanese-language newspaper in Los Angeles. No author names are attached to the senryu, and all are presented as single lines.
Here is another article about the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation which had thousands of Japanese members when it started.
breath, a collection of haiku 