May 31st

Rabbits race to shrub

abacus beads on runners

buff tails disappear

Pegsdon Hills again, I want to make the most of the long evenings. The rabbits saw me lumbering towards them and scarpered, all in the same direction, into the safety of shrubs!

May 21st

Black eyes examine

the gasping rabbit body

sweet hot red broken

I had to wake up at 4.30 to get out of the house at 5.30am. On my drive to the train station I saw a crow who’d just swooped down to test the corpse of rabbit roadkill. It must’ve been fresh, the crow looked pensive as if any minute many more birds would descend and take it away. That’s all I saw, I drove on.

The train station was cold, I had a jacket on. I was happy to get into the warmth. As the train hurtled northwards, I noticed the dull grey of morning give way to blazing sunshine. Summer had arrived.

Timid dawn lumbers

the mists shimmer burn away

summer’s love blazes

Two Haiku’s today, but my first of the year which cites summer.

February 25th

Shadows tumble down,

Rabbits wait, flat in their scrapes,

Between the hawthorns.

My second visit of the year to Pegsdon Hills. Saw a flock of long tailed tits, a bullish wren shouting at me to get out of its territory, a robin, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, a skylark singing high in the sky. And most excitingly a pair of Red Kites circling and crying their sad mewing call as well as a pair of buzzards too. Up high on the ridge these big birds of prey swooped and soared both above and below my sightline, scanning the ground for tasty prey.

January 20th

Dragged through pain, blindness,

Hot tears falling, reminders,

Hollow thoughts of home.

 

Was getting a little bit excited, you know, in a controlled stoic, square jawed, polar exploration way about two important Captain Scott exhibitions this year, to commemorate the 100 years of him and his team reaching the South Pole, but also of his death, expiring in the icy wilderness on the long slog back. One is at the Natural History Museum and the other at a museum I was ignorant of until a couple of weeks ago, the Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

I’m looking forward to seeing Scott’s diary (on loan from the British Library) with that poignancy in his last letter to his wife and final line, his hand so shaky through weakness “For God’s sake, look after our people”. Also, the photographs of Herbert Ponting and all the artefacts and scientific specimens collected.

My Haiku however is a tribute to Irish polar explorer Tom Crean, a mainstay of Scott’s expedition as well as others for both Scott and Shackleton. He seemed to be a big gentle bloke, one of those guys you always want on your team, even tempered, reliable and utterly trustworthy. Crean was a member of the support party for the final push, so was ordered to turn back despite being so close to the pole (168 miles), so devastated, he and two others followed the trail back to base (Edward Evans, William Lashley). They got lost and needed to take a long detour, meaning their food was in short supply. The Haiku references his heroic solo walk, 35 miles in 18 hours in terrible conditions to get help for his colleagues, Lashley was weak, and Evans was sick with disabling scurvy and snow blindness. The hot tears were Crean’s, he thought Evans had died. Evans later recounted “his hot tears fell onto my face”.

The illustrated children’s book Tom Crean’s Rabbit is a wonderful true story, about him trying to find a safe warm haven for the rabbit on Scott’s ship Terra Nova as they voyaged south. Well worth buying. By Meredith Hooper and Bert Kitchen.

 

 

Tom Crean (pic from Wikipedia)