Bridging

Orchestra Gum Tree

You would be forgiven for spinning the stir
of spring for all the fuss / kerfuffle here, today
on the mild breeze of the winter close,
this sectioned orchestra of insistent calls
(it would be unkind to call them loony tunes).

At first I think it's magpies, crows and currawongs,
honey eaters, noisy miners, but, tuning in
the heart and engine of the thing,  the major parts
are magpies in the great gum opposite -
their enterprise is stirring odd peripherals.

Even the occasional great train of wind
can't quell. It just redoubles against that rush.
Our blackbirds sit dumbly and look beady on,
as the 'You what, you what you what?' and the
antiphon banshee whistling overlay.

This ancient contemporaneity -
oh how they keep it up. I seem to get it -
as if a protest chanted its demands:
'And when do we want it? Now. Now. Now!
We want it all the ruddy afternoon.'

But no - at last a semi-silence seeds,
breaks the long movement with an intervening.
But hardcore restart (the shattered splinters join)
silhouette wings circling orchestra tree,
dislodged, drop, flap then settle back again.

Oh where are your moonlight sonatas, mates?
Your silvan morning flutings, enquiries,
tidings of oddities exchanged across gardens?
You've taken up with Stravinsky - midwinter
Rite of Spring  - enough to put Eliot into a spin.

...................

Magpies have a wide range of songs and calls. These choric alarms and excursions so different from their peaceful flutings.

This, below, from 1975

Two Moments

2

A tangle of wood and emptiness~
delicate in clear light like faulted air.

Blossom,
                  stationed
                                         at the tinted bough,
a drab bird weighs with pebble body,
shakes with her wings of slate.

2

Black backwater mirror;
where ducklings rush
after dropping breadcrumbs,
wing-tip-paddles wake.