Lynette Reilly: ‘Barnacles’ and ‘Haibun: You just know’

Haibun: You just know

The Gardens were our 100-acre wood, many hours from home. We organised working bees there for twenty years, and began getting ‘owning a country property’ out of our systems. There was satisfaction in the hard physical work – digging in the hard red ground with mattocks, planting hundreds of tubestock plants, adding watering systems, mapping and labelling them. Knowing we were keeping the founder’s dream alive – an arid-land Botanic Garden where plant treasures could still be found.
Now in our eighties, our vision doesn’t extend as far. After two years’ gap with Covid, we reacquaint ourselves with this precious patch of land. We rejoice anew at the kaleidoscope of birds and flowers, but mourn for the trees that have died – old existing ones and those we planted. Some of our dreams have died with them. We feel a void.
Younger bodies are replacing ours now. We hope they will always come. But for us, it’s time to move on – you just know when it’s time.

Autumn comes again
Time for planting hopes and dreams
But we have moved on.

Lynette Reilly

Barnacles—a haiku

Skin cancers emerge—
barnacles on ships that sail
through the seas of life.

Lynette Reilly