THE MOMENT

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

Exhaling, I hear the sound of my breath as I lean into the rising hush.  A breeze plays with a bit of puffy down, picks it up, twirling, a vortex along a dusty pathway.  A swallow circles the white bit of fluff that whirls this way, then that

until finally, in a suspended split-second, the bird snatches the fluff, flying quickly under the eaves of the deserted bank building

and deposits it into the newly-made nest.

small town
the second-hand shop sign
says ‘cash only’

2025 – Edited from a published version 2022 
(Modern Haiku (print edition) – editor Roberta Beary)

Seagulls

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

seagulls gather
on the abandoned trawler
a drifting cloud

Published Echidna Tracks #15 

October Showers

By: Regina (Gina) Piroska
Turners Beach, Tasmania, Australia

october showers
a blackbird tugs at the worm
stretching
we prepare to join the group 
at a yoga retreat

Published catchment edition 4 2025

Magpie

By: Regina (Gina) Piroska
Turners Beach, Tasmania, Australia

the magpie
postures on a sheep’s back
in tall wheat grass
the discarded red remains
of a rusted-out plough

Published catchment edition 4 2025

BEACHED

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

Heat hangs, torrid, pressing upon tired shoulders.

Touched by the occasional warm starfish an ancient, patchy, bird-shit monument kneels in puddled sand beneath a sky stitched to the sea.

below blue
sails billow
over blue

Ripples circle the rock where, in the tide’s cloud-crawl, tiny crabs get on with their crabby lives and I wonder how words can convey this sense without images to the eye.

On this slow, tedious, amplified afternoon, I lean against the colossus baffled by the clamour of these idiot gulls, ignorant in the art of give and take, because it’s perfectly clear who should yield.

crushed
shell in a footprint
empty beach

First Published in Drifting Sands Haibun, January 2022
~ Adelaide B Shaw guest editor.