SMH hiaku competition

8-3-2000

Surely never before have so many autumn leaves spiralled, swirled and wafted to the mossy earth as they did last week in response to our Sydney Writers' Festival haiku competition. That's not to say the entries amount to little more than poetic mulch. Far from it. We've been hard put to select the best. Not only was the range staggering - from gloom to euphoric, from sardonic to, well, as mad as a sack of rats - the syllable limit afforded us the added joy of practising counting up to 17. And no-one forgot the magic word, "Eternity". Kim Hunter from Surry Hills represented the fatigued urbanite with:

Shimmering harbour

Late for work

Haze

Traffic crawling

Eternity

Jenny White of Sydney gave us a genetic solution to her sense of metropolitan isolation:

Leaves brown, drifting down

feeling alone, make myself a clone

ahh ... eternity.

Then there was the elegantly facetious entry from Megan Hicks (address unavailable):

Sev-en-teen syll-a-

bles it will be, with four

of them e-tern-it-y

From Alex Damon of Lawson there was the dodgy but biting:(this is my favourite: ed.)

Dying for a P

A Q in the bank

An F-in Eternity

But Pat Mulhane of Flemington, Victoria, summarised the spirit of the entries so far with two of her several efforts ...

Do chickens have lips

Mike looks to eternity

Asking the question

and the thoughtful

I am her mother

Eternity is too short

To love a daughter.

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