Featured Haiku from Windfall 2 & 5

We continue our series from Windfall: Australian Haiku, an annual Australian print journal edited by Beverley George and published by Peter Macrow’s Blue Giraffe Press between 2013 and 2022 (ISSN 1839-5449).  Two very different poems concerning dogs are the featured haiku this time around.

truck window—
red dog logs on
to the wind
– Hazel Hall
Windfall 2, 2014

Hazel’s poem has a working or companion dog, travelling in the passenger seat beside a truck driver. It celebrates an often-observed behaviour of a dog hanging its head out of a vehicle window. Hazel employs a term from human computer use to very good effect here, suggesting the large amount of data that the dog is sensing through its nose in the wind. The assonance of ‘o’ sounds in L2 and the mostly single syllable words help to create a vivid, active impression. This is a generic red dog – an Australian kelpie, often a working dog. There was also a 2002 novel, and a 2011 film based on the book, with the title ‘Red Dog’, to which the poem alludes.

flooded valley
wild dogs
on the tree line
– Jo McInerney
Windfall 5, 2017

Jo’s haiku, in contrast, has a menacing tone. The valley is flooded, implying loss of homes, livelihoods or habitat. There might be farm animals stranded in unfamiliar terrain. The assonance of ‘o’ sounds is less pronounced than in the previous poem. In the second line the wild dogs intensify the sense of danger, ready to wreak further havoc. They might have been forced out of the valley by the floodwaters, and now they are marauding on the tree line. Maybe the narrator can see them, or perhaps she can hear them. The single syllable words of the phrase suggest movement. Although it’s not stated in the poem, I have a feeling that this is a nighttime scene.