Wednesday is the day that our garbage men arrive: once a fortnight, they take the green-topped FOGO bin and, on the alternate Wednesdays, they take the garbage and the recycling (yellow- and red- topped). I've always been pretty proud of the fact that we don't produce much garbage but the recycling bin is always full to overflowing. It's mostly cardboard, I note, from the packaging around many of the grocery items we buy, but also the boxes from the 'nust-have' items from Amazon, Kogan and so on. Temu use plastic bags which go straight to landfill.
We try not to buy stuff that produces rubbish. For a time, we bought our instant coffee in large glass jars which we thought would be useful for something else after they were emptied. When we had half a dozen taking up room in the pantry without any foreseeable future use, we decided it was time to make other arrangements and the jars went into the recycling.
And now we're experiencing deja vu all over again. We've taken to buying very nice biscuits from a local Korean shop. In fact, it's Nera who goes to the shop because they sell some of the exotic stuff which she likes. The biscuits, unfortunately, come in very attractive tins which are too nice just to throw out. Surely someone would like to have them, we say. It doesn't take long to eat a tin full of biscuits but then we have to harden our hearts and chuck out the tins. I put them straight into the rubbish but, maybe, the recycling bin would be a better option. Who knows?
As you can see, today's 'story' goes back four years. It was a strange exercise, we thought.
POEM FOR AN AUGUST
AFTERNOON AUGUST 14, 2020
It’s Wednesday already and I think I had better make a start
on doing my homework for the Friday morning Writing Group. As usual, the topics don’t immediately grab
me and I let them sit in my sub-consciousness while I have a cup of coffee. Not yet inspired, I make the tentative choice
of Poem for an August Afternoon but there’s no verb in the title so I’m not
sure whether I should ‘find’ a poem or ‘write’ a poem but it’s a writing group
so probably the latter. Anyway, I’ve no idea what to write so I’ll check Google
to see whether someone else’s writing might be the spur I need.
I quite like the poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne:
In the mute August afternoon
They trembled to some undertune
Of music in the silver air;
Great pleasure was it to be there.
… but it’s not what I’m looking for. Maybe it’s too English so I turn to the New
World and find this little ditty by Paul Laurence Dunbar:
When August days are hot an’ dry,
I won’t sit by an’ sigh or die,
I’ll get my bottle (on the sly)
And go ahead, and fish, and lie …
Then, of course, I realise, they’re both writing for the Northern Hemisphere where the weather is warm. Those poems certainly don’t reflect a Tasmanian August. Here, in Australia, and especially in Tasmania, August is generally one of the colder months and I certainly won’t forget that just last week we had the worst snowstorm in my memory.
I go straight to my old favourites, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, and there’s stuff there about Winter, but not specifically mentioning August. Roderick J Flanagan, an ex-patriate Irishman, in his poem Australian Winter, tries hard but his language is a bit flowery for my taste:
The hoar-frost marks the grassy lawn at morn,
But fades when the first
matin beam appears,
Till earth grows bright, as those erewhile forlorn,
Joy when their hope a
sunlit aspect wears.
In some ways, August seems to be the forgotten month for poets in the Southern Hemisphere – not quite Winter but not yet Spring. We imagine we’ve put the worst of Winter behind us and are now in some sort of self-induced hibernation until the first daffodil and wattle blooms tell us that Spring is here. It’s disappointing that poets seem to ignore the special flavour of a Tasmanian August- that never-ending dullness and dampness -so I have marked this month in Tasmania with an attempt at a haiku:
Grey skies overhead
Spreading their gloom on the world
A slough of despond.
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