The Fringe Myrtles met at our favourite location, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne. It was the day after the referendum on the Voice to Parliament (more on that below).
Present were Alice Wanderer, Di Cousens, Robbie Coburn, Robbie Cairns, Maria Fazio, Jennifer Sutherland, Madhuri Pillai, Liv Saint-James, Louise Hopewell and Rob Scott. We were lucky with the weather as the forecast was bleak. With the recent publication of the ‘under the same moon: The Fourth Anthology of Australian Haiku’, Rob, who is one of the editors, brought a bag of copies with him to distribute to the group. Everyone was delighted to receive the anthology and spent the first part of the meeting reading and signing each other’s copies.
We then talked about scheduling meetings for 2024 and it was agreed that meeting 4 times a year would be preferable. The current proposal is to have formal meetings in March, May, July and October, with the possibility of gathering informally/socially at other times of the year.
A ginko was then held, during which we took a stroll to the fringe myrtle bush we found in the gardens last year. Unfortunately they had already bloomed and their starry flowers had shriveled up. Nevertheless, we wrote some haiku and reconvened at the Tea House to share our haiku.
Fringe Myrtles meetings are always a delight, but there was a considerable pall over this gathering given the result of the referendum the night before. The result of the referendum was a jolting experience that will take much time to digest. Thankfully, poetry gives us comfort during difficult times. It is a coping mechanism for many. Writing poetry is a way of making sense of the world and our place in it.
hard wind
leaving everything in tatters
a resounding ‘No’
Rob Scott
Australian Haiku Society 