This time last year I was staying at a farm in Rupanyup, a small country town set amid a great many fields of wheat. Towards the end of the day I went out for a walk. As they say in the classics, it was quiet out there. There was the occasional twittering of an occasional bird, and a hint of wind, but nothing else.

I followed a fence between two of those fields of wheat, and noticed the distinctive skyline of the Grampians some miles south. I walked for a bit, eventually coming to a road, and then I walked back the way I'd come. There had been rumours of snakes, and the field was so large that the farmhouse was invisible from the other side of it. So I followed the fence all the way back, as the Grampians faded from view, as darkness fell.

While on this walk I wrote a haiku. To be honest, I was rather hoping I could come up with a sonnet, say, or an impressive opening section of a novel in rhyme, say, but all I came up with was a single, simple haiku.

This then marks the one-year anniversary of an early evening stroll along the side of a paddock, and the five-year anniversary of the beginning of SoFo:

Troubled times in an
old world. The moon still travels
across darkened skies.