On Saturday, 21st September, I had scheduled another Hiku Hike. It was to be with a difference, as I sought to impart some of the principles of the Haiku form and to facilitate a little elementary practice of that form during the two-and-a-half hour workshop.
There were a couple of people who apologised for being unable to make it and, for the first time this year, nobody attended this Hiku Hike. I took this as a twofold opportunity. Firstly, it gave me a break from holding space for much-valued others and offered a chance to do that for myself for a change. Secondly, I thought, I could probably assimilate the principles of Haiku more thoroughly, before trying to impart them to others. Thus, I spent the first part of my solitary workshop reading aloud to myself Raphael D'Abdon's comprehensive list of essential principles of Haiku, on p.4 of his article on African and South African Haiku. Thereupon I meandered and jotted and finally tried to compose a few Haiku poems.
 |
One of the Haiku that came to me, which I was - at least provisionally - satisfied with, reads as follows:
First rains,fresh otter tracks,shreds of plastic hug rocks.
This Haiku is a neat three-liner, containing a reference to a season - "First rains".
There is an internal association between the images of the fresh otter tracks and the shreds of plastic hugging the rocks. The Haiku leaves it open to you, the reader, what to make of this association.
Are the otter tracks as fresh as the plastic is old? Is the plastic hugging the rocks, because it wants, as the otters implicitly do, to belong to the first rains, to the flow of water?
The plastic is personified by means of the word 'hugging', which is an elemental human gesture. Is the plastic thus a symbol of humans hugging the earth (where the rocks are a symbol of earth)?
The shreds are by definition not whole, not fresh, not seasonal. So is there a pitifulness about them, a sense of them holding on, despite being neither 'first' nor 'fresh'?
Nor are they mobile as the otters are, who are gone, having left only their tracks. The 'hugging' can thus be seen as a 'clinging to' - the shreds of plastic are stuck to the rocks, they cannot move by themselves, but are dependent on other forces to move.
Finally, of course, and perhaps most obviously, the otters leave behind their tracks, while humans leave behind - plastic. That is to say, the "first rains", denoting spring, are already polluted, not fresh.
There are surely more ways of reading this Haiku. The above are just a few possible takes.
And then I felt guilty.
It was International Ocean Cleanup Day, which had come, complete with an official form, for responsible folk to record exactly what and how much litter they were gathering, and here I was, writing Haiku about plastic, instead of picking it up!
So, the next day I took a bag and began.
Here is an image of a small portion of what I saw, facing east.
It was tiring to keep bending my old back, while balancing on the tipping stones, but I managed within a couple of hours to fill the bag. I concentrated on small bits of polystyrene, fishing line and plastic stuck between and around washed-up twigs and branches, thinking of the many birds and creatures who might try to eat these small 'treats'. The words on the yellow packet, which you can make out in the image below, spoke a truth.
After filling my bag, this is what I looked at, facing west:
The above photograph shows tiny pieces of plastic, including what I believe are pellets from toy bb guns, which can barely be picked up, unless you have the fingers of a three-year-old.
When I lived in Knysna, the Environmental Management team, appointed by that Municipality, ensured that the beaches retained their blue flag status - a status I see they thankfully still have. One of the things they do is send out droves of paid cleaners with special sieves, whereby they are able to filter tiny pieces of plastic, such as bb gun pellets and, not least, the dreaded nurdles, from the sand. It's slow work and, in the ringing, wise words of my old friend, the late John Hale, "endless, but not futile".
John Hale, by the way, was an unsung hero, much cherished by the Simonstown community, who, together with the late botanist Hugh Taylor, formed S.A.V.E. (Swartkop Alien Vegetation Eradicators) on the Cape South Peninsula in the 1980s, and, with a small team that included his wife Pam, myself and a couple of others, kept the slope of that mountain clear of Myrtle and Port Jackson for decades. How? We went up every Monday morning for 2 hours and pulled out 100 saplings each.
I hope that SANBI and the local municipalities in the Eastern Cape feel challenged to assist in the clean-up of the beaches here, to achieve blue flag status too. What with this province's groundbreaking prosecution of rhino poachers and, touchwood, continuing to resist Shell's drive to test wild coast waters by means of seismic booming, I have faith.
Cormorant - bathing - emerges.Neck and breast curve,comfort my gaze.
- Silke Heiss
No comments:
Post a Comment