Over the O-bon holidays, I read under the same moon: Fourth Australian Haiku Anthology, edited by Lyn Reeves, Vanessa Proctor and Rob Scott, published by Forty South Publishing. O-bon is a summer festival time in Japan when ancestral spirits return, and much like Christmas time in Australia, it is a special time, when just about everyone in the country returns to their ancestral land; or if not, at least to their parental homes to spend time with their extended families.
Having heard Rob Scott say at a conference that haiku in Australia is now entering an exciting period, I was especially interested in finding out more about Australian keywords, which are being developed by poets instead of kigos.
Kigos in Japan are seasonal words listed in the saijiki, a glossary of seasonal words used by haiku poets. Using Australian keywords instead of kigos made much sense, because the saijiki is full of animals that don’t exist outside Japan and its surrounding regions, such as yama-dori, a Japanese native pheasant; or of cultural observances or references that don’t exist outside Japan like O-bon. And kigos would be seasonally confusing, because Japan is in the northern hemisphere, and shichigatsu, which means July, is a summer kigo, while in Australia, in the southern hemisphere, July is in winter.
Yet Australian keywords may have too many variables to consider because Australia is a large continent with variety of climate systems; because there are more than 250 indigenous languages in Australia, with profound knowledge of the Australian environment spanning over 60,000 years; while the Australian official language and its dominant culture, English, has less than 300 years of history with its environment; and because a third of its population were born overseas, and from many different regions around the world. The largest migrant groups in Australia now are no longer from the United Kingdom, but from India, the People’s Republic of China and the Philippines.
Yet I was able to find many Australian keywords and phrases in under the same moon. And although I wasn’t born in Australia, having lived there for nearly forty years, these keywords resonated, felt comforting, and gave me a sense of belonging. I was surprised, considering I currently live in Japan, the country of my birth.
I especially liked the references to gum trees: ghost, lemon scented, angophora; birds and animals: galahs, currawongs and bogong moths; and other distinctively Australian words such as: tree-change and outback. References to drought, floods and bushfires, although not unique to Australia, characterizes Australian concerns.
There are many haikus in under the same moon with mention of native plants, such as in poet Glenys Ferguson’s poem on a bush send off:
bush send off
banksias and bottlebrush
for this bloke’s casket
- poet Glenys Ferguson
Although is arguable whether ‘bloke’ is Australian. Without having lived in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa or New Zealand, where the word bloke is also used, but ‘bloke’ to me is distinctively Australian, and banksias and bottlebrushes are most definitely Australian.
desert rainstorm
a flood of
wildflowers
- poet Fiona H. Evans
There are many other haikus in the anthology that do not mention native Australian plants or animals.
Poet Fiona H. Evans’ haiku about dessert flowers, for instance, does not mention specific native plants which are distinctively Australian, or perhaps to be more precise, West Australian, but the haiku reminds me of being in the West Australian desert at the beginning of the wildflower season:
cherry blossoms
falling on my hair –
the lightest rain
- poet Katherine Gallagher
Cherry blossoms, for an example, are a spring kigo in Japan, and are not native to Australia, but there are many established in Australia as imported plants: in Young, New South Wales, where cherries orchards flourish, and the nearby town of Cowra, where avenues of cherry blossoms were planted to remember the Cowra Breakout, a tragic event in WWII, when Japanese POWs escaped on mass.
We find poet Katherine Gallagher’s cherry blossom haiku written with a similar sensitivity to those poets who write about cherry blossoms in Japan:
In fact, in Broome in Western Australia, O-bon has been practiced by the local people for over a hundred years during the August full moon at the Japanese Cemetery. Many of the Indigenous Australians there have Japanese ancestors because of Broome’s pearling history. If they were to write for the next Australian anthology, O-bon may well become an Australian keyword. Or would it?
An interesting addition to the anthology is poet Takanori Hayakawa’s three haikus, one of which is about Hiroshima.
Hiroshima memorial –
thousands of paper cranes
pierced by strings広島忌
千羽鶴
胴突き抜かれ
- poet Takanori Hayakawa
Hiroshima memorial or Hiroshima-ki is a Japanese kigo, however it is presumptuous to assume that this was written about a memorial in Hiroshima, especially just because the poet has a Japanese name. Hiroshima day is observed in Australia on 6th of August every year, often in the form of a peace march or rally. There are many Australian primary schools where children fold a thousand cranes for peace. Either way the meaning of the poem remains the same.
Hayakawa’s three haikus are the only poems presented bilingually: in Japanese and English. We don’t know if Hayakawa wrote the poems in Japanese first, then translated them into English; even if he had written in English first, this bilingual presentation invites interesting possibilities for the future of Australian haiku, especially if Indigenous poets begin to embrace haiku in their traditional language.
But like its title, under the same moon, it is our shared humanity that touches us, with or without its Australian-ness or Japanese-ness. For me, Maurice Neville’s four poems, which could have been written anywhere in the world, are what moved me the most:
at home
at the hospice
first daffodils
early bulbs
such vibrant colours
she left us
two years on
sometimes still reaching
for two plates
the effort
to be light –
butterfly
- poet Maurice Neville
under the same moon features 104 of Australian haiku poets and is beautifully illustrated by Olivia Ark.
Under the Same Moon: Fourth Australian Haiku Anthology | eds. Lyn Reeves, Vanessa Proctor, Rob Scott
- Mayu Kanamori 2024