Farmyard Haiku

I recently spent a week in the Cederberg mountains near Clanwilliam. For the last three years I have gone there as part of the Bishop’s College Epic, to lead groups of grade 10s who are on a hiking adventure course, through the Bushman Rock Art Trail. I refer to the Rock Art in my next blog.

While there, I noticed that on many farms, perhaps it is all farms that the implements, tools and vehicles are never removed. They are simply left close to where they were once useful. So I share with you a few pictures and some haiku to delight and amuse you.

A haiku is a Japanese poem which has three lines. The first line has five syllables, the next line seven and the third line five. They present a picture and take you on a journey. In my case I am putting a haiku alongside a picture.

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The Englishman’s Grave
Harrow under Southern Cross
A tree your soul friend

The Englishman’s Grave is beside the road, very close to the top of the Pakhuis Pass in the Cederberg. From the pass there is a wonderful view of the Karoo rising up about a 1000 ft to the escarpment on which the rest of South Africa is built. On the other side are the Cape Fold Mountains which have their source from when the continents clashed millions of years ago.
The Englishman buried here was Lieutenant Graham Vinicombe Winchester Clowes of the Ist Battalian Gordon Highlanders. His unit tried to stop the Boers from infiltrating the Cape Colony. He was killed in action on 30 January 1901.

His mother came out to visit his grave every year for the rest of her life until 1936. I’m sure that it was never a pleasant boat journey.

He was educated at Harrow, the famous school in North West London.

As we gathered there I read them the poem by Thomas Hardy called Drummer Hodge which comes from the same era and speaks to this story and the story of many others, who came from English villages and died in a foreign land, as a result of the Boer War.

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined — just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the drummer never knew —
Fresh from his Wessex home —
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

Thomas Hardy 1899

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Peace and Joy

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• Meditations on the way of the Cross for Holy Week
• Celebrating 190 years of St Paul’s Anglican Church Rondebosch