Alice Wanderer
On the Horizon
(Anderson Hunt's Iron Landscape, 2009, Cranbourne)
Life-sized. Leafless. Three artificial trees emerge from a platform of red scoria. Recalling ringbarked River Red Gums, each has a trunk of rusted iron with attached silvery patches, two branches and a few terminal twigs. A uniform blue scorcher of a day.
Below the platform, at ground level, a beach of sand. Eight scattered rocks, also made of iron, represent the major fragments of the Cranbourne Meteorite. A fiery sky visitor.
Ryōanji. Contented Dragon Temple. Late 15th century. Kyoto.
A dry rock garden. 15 stones stand in raked ripples of white gravel. 14 peaks emerge from mist or foam. From every observation point, a 15th disappears.
bushfire clean-up skulls at the waterhole
Note: Anderson Hunt’s Iron Landscape installation commemorates the Cranbourne meteorite, the second largest meteorite found in Australia. Since the mid-1800s, several fragments have been found in the city of Cranbourne in Melbourne, Australia. Click to learn more. Photo by Alice Wanderer.
About the Author
Alice Wanderer has dabbled in haiku for a long time and began writing haibun in 2020. Her book Lips Licked Clean, a translation of selected haiku by the early 20th-century woman poet Sugita Hisajo, was published by Red Moon Press and won a Touchstone Award in 2021.