brain cards i shuffle the fog
Author: Lorin Ford
Growing up first in the Seaford Beach/Kananook Creek area and then in Cann River, Croajingolong country, East Gippsland, formed Lorin's sense of belonging to the natural world. Lorin began writing haiku in 2004. She served on the judging panel for the Haiku Dreaming Awards (2009), on the The Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Books Awards Panel (2010, 2011 and 2012) and was co-judge with Lee Gurga for the H.S.A.'s 2018 Henderson Haiku Awards. Lorin was haiku editor for the first nine (quarterly) issues of Notes From the Gean (2009 - 2011) and subsequently publisher of A Hundred Gourds (2011 - 2016) where she served as haiku editor, features editor, managing editor and in other editorial roles. In 2014 she founded the 'Red Kelpie Haiku Group' (Melbourne, Australia), convening four meetings each year until the group broke up subsequent to its twentieth meeting in June 2019. Over the years, Lorin's haiku have received awards and been included in excellent anthologies.
Books Published:
'a wattle seedpod' (Post Pressed, Teneriffe, Qld, Australia, 2008); e-chapbooks: 'what light there is' (3Lights Gallery, 2009) and 'A Few Quick Brushstrokes', a winner of the Snapshot Press e-chapbook competition, 2011. All three publications are available online, free of charge.
storm alert –
the sound of banana fronds
slapping
dusklight
the wake of a black swan
w i d e n i n g true blue the bower bird’s allure
ebb tide
crabhole after crabhole
sighs
the day nurse
weighs her every word . . .
cloud shadows
it’s hot, it’s hot . . .
the late-night complaints
of banjo frogs
lockdown -
a tin can
rolling
back and forth
with the wind
telling me over and over the undertow
no fly in a flicker of the bluetongue’s tongue
crimson rosellas –
how many years since
I whistled?
bones decaying
into data —
a withered field
thunderbolt
a glimpse of the puppeteer’s
fingertips
rock walls the river shapes no designated god
old pond
oil slick rainbows
slip in
she waves a thin blue scarf becoming sky
new galaxy
a pomegranate
splits its skin
beyond the black stump a shiver of ghost gums
seen through a reef shark my dependency
mackerel clouds
silver gulls squabble
over the bones
still some swagger
in his white linen trousers
the summer wind
green field
fallow field
a scarecrow's
patchwork
life
the road home each bend unwinding an earlier version
waltzing matilda two beats ahead of the rain
migrating geese—
wind flaps the scarecrow’s
empty sleeves
where creek willows weave the sunlight ducklings
thunderbolt---
eyes light up
in the pine tree
sun-baked dust— the one thing moving is my neighbour's tongue
drizzle and mud—
sparrows sinking deeper
into drab
on a bare twig rain beads what light there is
owl’s call sounding the depth of a winter night
commuter platform
a harmonica blowing
the freight train blues