Over

Summer grass
all that remains of soldiers’ dreams
                                                          Basho 

With a calendar month of summer left, the season has already turned. On still days, sound carries in a new way, as if propagated differently within the increasingly oblique angle of light, and the light itself, travelling a greater distance through the atmosphere, catches dust and smoke so that everything swims, resinous, as if in amber. River fog gathers overnight, then lifts cool air over ridge-saddles along the valley each morning. With the swing of the planet away from the sun, we sit now at the slow centre of weather systems as they pass, rather than at their fast-moving edges. For days at a time, we’re overarched by a dome of blue.

In a logging coup across the river a fire starts, and then another and another – still dangerous at this time of year – but each time there’s no wind, and rainbearing fronts drop a little moisture, and the fire is quenched. But the sun still stings, and in the forest, light filtered through eucalypt leaves retains its glare; the ground is dry and hard. Damp cool nights and shortening days are comforting, as heatwaves continue on the mainland, where there’s also flooding – a tropical low dumps huge volumes of rain into ephemeral waterways in central Australia, and Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre is expected to fill – a rare event.

All of this is accompanied by its correlatives at global, national, local, familial, personal levels. Military traffic builds in the northern hemisphere and threats and counterthreats are exchanged; the US president promises war and/or military and economic interventions of various kinds with enemies and allies alike – Iran, Europe, Mexico, Canada – and with the whole world, in fact, via increased trade tariffs in response to his own country’s Supreme Court ruling that previous tariffs instituted by him were illegal. Around this, rhetoric calculated to be divisive at every level of society regarding race, gender, nationality etc floods the channels.

Nesting is mostly done, although bronzewing pigeons seem to be gearing up for another round; from windbreaks on both sides of the house I hear their one-note invitation, a soft repeating hoot like a jug player winding down after a hard night with the band. A grey robin chick still follows its parents, asking for food, trembling its wings. It stops at the water dish for a drink, and looking in, begs from its reflection. Late cuckoos call, and satin flycatchers and cuckoo shrikes leave the forest to seek water in the garden or maybe to look for others of their kind as they prepare to migrate. The water level in garden pots and pools drops quickly, both from evaporation and from the amount of water flicked around by birds.

One day, bringing the hose to top up a pond, I startle two green rosellas bathing, their feathers still edged by the dark margins that mark them out as juveniles. After a moment first one, then the other return to bathe at my feet, looking up to make eye contact now and then as they shake their whole bodies in the pleasure of the pool. These parrots, endemic to the island, appeared in the garden as soon as the groundcovers and flowering shrubs and fruit trees we planted started to grow. They nest in a hollow tree in the forest downslope but seem to spend most of their time close to the house and in the hawthorn hedges along the track. The two bathing youngsters have known me from the time they fledged and so have their parents and grandparents, given that they live around fifteen years.

Blackberries, hawthorn berries, elderberries ripen and the hedgerows begin to sound with rosella conversation over the cracking of hawthorn seeds. Whistling starling flocks have been gathering for a while, and now they whirl in to feast on blackberries, turning the ground purple-white under their roosting trees. The bluetongue lizard seems to have doubled in circumference since shedding a skin a few weeks ago, and not just because of what she’s eaten. Birthing season is late summer and autumn, and there’s a good chance we’ll see young ones soon. She emerges from her lair under the compost heap to eat ripe grapes knocked down by possums and rats and birds from the vine overhead, and to accept raspberries and snails from T, but it’s clear I’m not forgiven for catching her to pull the ticks from her ears. She hisses and rears at me.

Buckets of tomatoes come in and it’s passata season. Two big pots on the go – one to boil and soften the fruit, another to reduce the sieved pulp by about half. The autumn raspberries are ripening, and the white grapes, golden-green translucent against the light, have been followed by little crunchy black clusters from vines in another part of the polytunnel. Cucumbers seem to double in size overnight, and we have them to give away.

Finally Israel and the US launch an offensive against Iran, and outright war continues. We all see the video footage of missiles flying and falling, hit and counter-hit; satellite images of drone strikes, flattened neighbourhoods, attack planes lined up along runways. Cognitive dissonance enough to drive us mad, the disconnection at a creaturely level between action and consequence. This will go on until we’re exhausted, and those who profit from the destruction judge that they’ve squeezed as much as they can get, for now, from those on both sides of the conflict. There will be a time when this is over.

Reference

Matsuo Basho. The Complete Haiku. Trans. Jane Reichhold. Kodansha International, 2008.