Lorin Ford’s A Wattle Seedpod opens the reader to an Australia seen through haiku eyes. Ford’s haiku rarely decorate nature; they listen to it. They find the sacred in rust, the eternal in dust, and the lyric in a magpie’s note. Like Bashō, she writes with humility before the world; like Janice Bostok, she roots haiku in the pulse of her homeland.
first light –
eye to dreaming eye
with a kookaburra
At dawn, human and bird meet gaze to gaze — the local kigo of the kookaburra replacing Japan’s bush warbler.
heat shimmer
a kingfisher’s wings
answer the river
A mirage made musical. The wings “answer” the river, Ford’s summer shimmer transforms realism into reverie.
headstone
a leaf crosses out
the I in his name
A moment of accidental elegy. The leaf’s movement erases selfhood, returning “I” to the soil. Restraint, not sentiment, gives this poem its quiet ache.
the rusted hooks
in Dad’s tackle box –
spring tide
Time’s twin forces: decay and renewal. The “rusted hooks” meet the surging tide, the personal and the eternal crossing like lines in water. Memory here is tidal — ebbing yet returning.
bon-bons
a wattle seedpod opens
with a pop
The title poem captures Ford’s signature balance of play and profundity. A Christmas bon-bon and a seedpod share the same joyful pop! — a small explosion of life, laughter, and renewal.
A Wattle Seedpod is a landmark in Australian haiku — not for its innovation alone, but for its authenticity. Ford does not borrow Japanese scenery; she translates its spirit into the idiom of her own landscape.
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You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.
Essays, Art and Plays by Dan 
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