OO

- OO -

After the chattering of the earlier birds
of dawn
the morning after came with a mm or oo
of a pigeon
that deep-throated oom of a bronzewing;
more question
than answer, sounding the sub-sonic calls
of yearning
but of the bird, nothing to be seen but a flash
of gold in a feather.

Relaying Flight

RELAYING FLIGHT

The flighty way the intrepid bird moves
as it flits ahead of my flat-driving bicycle
over the plains, the salt-laken causeway,
in its landings, perched a paused moment
on some chosen fencepost before going on
again across the wet-n-treeless grassland,

stopping,
only to go a further way,
and again;

puts me in mind of that free more formal poem
where flight is versed up to be sung line by line
in stretched phrases drawn of a wildly anxious
equanimity comes at last to its wide wingends
in that upward flourish when the hunterbird
rises to its flight rescue in a sheltering tree.

Another Species Back from Paper Extinction

ANOTHER SPECIES BACK FROM PAPER EXTINCTION


A Night Parrot
has been captured in a blurry
Photographic image
In the Great Sandy Desert
One plump
mottle-green bird with yellow belly
Flits between
invisibility and chance observation.

Airmanship

-Swallow flight through a narrow defile -Image by Keith Ringland:"She didn't have to swerve, or even apply the brakes. With just a flap and a twist a swallow swooped through a two-inch gap in a locked barn door."

AIRMANSHIP

You and I would gulp and swerve,
but these fliers dash in on a curve,
angling in on a fast flourish of wing
as their fly proves it has no lure string
and speed enter a tank's gaping bung
they spin into dark; pull up not wrong!
The sky swallows that never till here rest,
coming in to their darkened cavern nest.

Winged Pause

WINGED PAUSE


When chestnut-capped
And breasted Welcome Swallows come
To a standstill,
They never do so for nothing, or for long;
Always in purpose
Like they do to roost upon a sagging wire
Or, in its season, to
Come to some shape in solidity to build a nest
Which is why a pair
Are landing now atop the old holed rusty bungtop
Of the corrugated iron
Tank just outside my window, and see, one descends
Still further beneath
The sky, into its gloom, between its ripple-bent walls
And are not disoriented,
Above the drip-circling mirrors of its black and watery floor
To mud up a wall cup
Nest and raise more of that winged kind who
Do not sit at tables or at rest
To eat, but fly from winged pause to feast above us
In the restaurants of the sky.

Like Letter Boxes In A Lake

LIKE LETTER BOXES IN A LAKE


Fancy, a town lake with wet streets of reeds
All pillar-boxed by rows of roosting Nile Egrets

Each reedy clump has its white sentinel pegged
To stand there whitely like mailboxes up one leg

Outside each unlettered rafia house, they don't bunch
Up but shrug up for night, tuck heads in, and hunch

Shoulders to wait out for morning, delivering edge
To the willow-wand frontages of houses of sedge

Listed not on a realtor's blurb, nor gavelled auctioneering
Not to be bought, the airmail delivered on an egret wing.


Wayne David Knoll
July 28, 2016

Rare Fruit : Australian Eastern Yellow Robin

RARE FRUIT

Like an unheard idea of a rare fruit
with wings
they droop from bush branch and
tree trunk;
yellow robins that ripen of the grey
dull winter
with a sweet-slumbering sun close
as family
in the sheer cheer of a bright-eyed
mind harvest;
they flit here as if they complete
the cryptic
mystery with darts of feed-found
wild intelligence.

Of Otherwise, Selah

OF OTHERWISE, SELAH

~ by Wayne David Knoll

The cynical intellectual lauds his nothing as
the agnostic wears his black T-shirt with the
blazon 'Religion: together we can find a cure'

in the same world where the age's traffic flees off
on no pilgrimage but haste, a progress anxiety to be
not here, else, where, in a tree near the front porch

an Australian magpie here warbles it's lyrical refrain:
the mellifluous sweetness of otherwise, Selah.

April 1, 2015

Armed With the Weapons of The Whipbird

~ Whip Bird by Jacob Butler


ARMED WITH THE WEAPONS OF THE WHIPBIRD


~ by Wayne David Knoll

To be like that black-crested pied-green camouflaged creature
Of the hidden esteem; more usually heard than seen, hardly ever
Seen, Djou: Eastern Whipbird; denizen of Australia's temperate
Rainforests, Djou haunts the wet gullies near streams in spate
Or on the slopes in inclement times, come rain, come fog
And to keep on the air - above all the dampness, that bog
To feed on mosquitos and gnats rising from all that's moist
To be at the arms of command in leather strands of big voice.

A being intensified by not being seen, having presence
A personality accentuated by other's sense of its absence
It's appearance lurks in the background of our kind
While its call holds like a song caught unique in the mind
Like an asymmetrical soldier, guerrilla fighters out of reach
Of everyday lenses, for our common ear-hackles fail to teach
Us the nuances and subtleties with which the creator makes
And few go out mindful enough to what seeing (or hearing) takes.

Without divisions in strength or firepower other
Than that held secret - beyond thin beak and claw
For Djou - the Eastern Whipbird -has quite another
String to its born armour
That Coachwhip, that long-plaited leathery-string of sound
Which it so gradually unwinds - in unassuming yet profound
Slow motion -so to build towards an inevitable hugely audible frack
That rends the whole air - sounds to end in a deadly Whipcrack.

Eastern Whipbird -photograph by Brian McCauley

Lady In Pink

LADY IN PINK

Sometimes she does go out
With the plain-looking Corellas
But she's at her colourful best about
With her own, such mad Galahs

As cry to double and colour up an evening
Gathering all of the last light
To herself - just being fascinating
By looking utterly composed in absolute fright.

It's Corellas

IT’S CORELLA - or, Forget the Paper Cockatoo

- by Wayne David Knoll

Forget the cut-down moniker Cockie
And leave off the nickname of Cockatoo
It is your sulphur crested’s unsung cousins
The Corellas that are the farmers, those daily
Ground-haunting weather-eyed watchers of the sky.

Call them Bill, Little, Long or Short Bill, if you look
you’ll find the unassuming blue-eyed birds grasping
at grass, their claws protruding from the trouser leggings
of their dirty white overalls, nightly cleaned,
then soiled by day in faithfully picking out their field.

They go at digging without makeup in the pick
of the full facial of dogged intention, their cheeks
flushed with the intense rose thread blooming up
of the country air, ignoring distraction, with a shrug
of no-nonsense get-down attitude, willing any can-do

to seek opportunity, find a crop, make a harvest
of what the blood and bone graveyard of this earth
might yield up, as if a commonsense of root and stem
and its short provender of bulbs and seed-heads
were for all the world the last and final intelligence

of a whole economy, and the open secret they protect
behind the pale blue shades, spectacles worn as they work
out the gold threads from the ground, while roots of pink
age-creases grow out of the blue below their eyes as if
twirling threads loosed from these artisan’s lost tapestry

woven out of the wild’s open liquidation. What Corellas
mean is as difficult for us as what they are: a day's ordinary is
extra-ordinary, the mean-seeming: special; a common or garden
culture of this vast uncelebrated reality is worth attending
for its five-star thrift of providence in the grass, blade, root.

This world is as no theory is; but is as it is; in the tough-shy
nitty gritty of the Corella bird's day of empirical grassland
and never much as you or I might find it in even the best
of textbooks, let alone as any file, any film or documentary
entry in our archives and marked for long life ‘Cockatoo.’

Offside the virtual human world are many Corellas.

- Mooroolbark, Victoria

Corella Sky

CORELLA SKY

Summer's morning sky
Is all corella cry

Where the wrench-faced blanche of cockatoos
Screech not just by ones and twos

But in concert of sun-struck thousands where all the audience play
Each manic bird the Prima Donna of the day

So their screamed songs lash the air with siren calls
To whip fellow creature ears in stiff-feathered caterwauls

As if to prove their number in the wild sanctimony
Found in each other's raucous cacophony.


10 December 2016

Collective Noun Flight

- A murmuration of starlings


Sound Video- Corellas Fly to Roost



COLLECTIVE NOUNS IN FLIGHT

If you've watched
evolved Attenborough's latest 'Flight'
you'll know that
this nature documentary in 3D by
third degree features
mobbing-massive flocks of Starlings arriving
in Rome to roost
in park trees, which, to avoid peregrine
falcons fly a dance
in formation, a blitz-n-blizzard of birds
that he calls
by the established name, a murmeration.

So now I wonder,
for every night I've heard before sight
a massed flock
coming in to roost, but of Australian birds,
to the parkland trees
inside the watered town, I'm hearing
no murmurs
for this cloud's a mass screech of Corellas seen
or unseen
a sound-cloud which to be believed must be heard
and might
collectively be named a cacophonation.


25 February 2015

- A cacophonation of corellas.

Post-Winter Bird Clamour

POST-WINTER BIRD CLAMOUR


The risen sun of July already
Sounds through with starling
Whistles and the coos of doves:
As if the birds know what it is
That the climate tinkerers lost.

30 July 2017

New Holland Honeyeater

NEW HOLLAND HONEYEATER

- by Wayne David Knoll

As if in a time of shared grief, as if that much
tragedy unites, these seer-sprites remind of earlier
Australian links to the merchant seafarer Dutch,
come to the call of a New Holland Honeyeater

(Phylidonyris Novaehollandiae), that mushes
the currs off correa flowers and sips bottlebrushes
a mere bird in gumleaf shape, in its pied camouflage,
appears but a moment before our passing cage.

'Tch Tch Tch,' it calls, in an alto like a sung sneeze
nothing at all like a 'Tsk Tsk' of hateful scolding;
more like affection's daily call to pets for cheese,
a thing almost grand-parental, old, enfolding;

as if a 'Tuck-in now', only pointier and sharper,
like a chook calling its chickens only higher
up the tree, the striated, beaked visitor of flowers
works honey of all the tweaked daylight hours

with sun-bright gold in quick flashes of its wing
and a 'Tchuk touche' at day’s end and beginning.

July 24, 2014

Meeting Global Aliens in Australia Felix

MEETING THE GLOBAL ALIENS OUT IN THE CORANGAMITE


In this southern global
summer of morning on the Western Plains
named by the surveyor
explorer Major Thomas Livingstone Mitchell
as Australia Felix, himself
named for the African explorer David Livingstone,
one long and slim bird
with the flash of candled world sunlight on its wing,

a New Holland Honeyeater,
that is, Phylidonyris novaehollandiae,
named by the British
ornithologist John Latham in 1781, who took post
of taxidermised specimens
sent him by Sir Joseph Banks, hangs like
a suckling at the breast
from a garden where the old fashioned Fuschias,

and this is the pink-red
Fuchsia Magellanica flower in the long-trousers of
its bells in a Genus
which French Minim monk and botanist, Charles Plumier,
called after his foxy
friend & colleague, German botanist Leonhart Fuchs,
and that originate
from Chile and Argentina, of old Gondwanaland,

but in the Cono Sur zone
of Andean and temperate South America
in a Species named
for the Straits of Magellan, which, in turn of course
were named for Ferdinand
Magellan, the well-known intrepid Portuguese
explorer and navigator,
and also known as the hummingbird fuchsia,

are confluent here,
translated here,
here meet: as is meet and good;
as if all the languages
and botanists and avian science and the explorers
of far flung places and lands
were met with here in this, as Banks and Fuchs
meet Latham and Plumier
and Magellan and Livingstone meet Mitchell;

all well met in the nectar
that the host of Magellanica fuschia weeps
and which an early-bird
novaehollandiae honeyeater intrepidly imbibes;
a simple bird drinking
from a simple garden flower in a simple - like it
was a call to go, to name,
a peeling carillion of red-clad global bells.

Gorook Song - (Australian Magpie Song)

GOROOK SONG (AUSTRALIAN MAGPIE SONG)

- by Wayne David Knoll

Light washes dark sky with its call out
For a first word as the song of the birds.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

The tree necks a break for the hard weather
It’s branch offers a table to cling out a wait.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Here’s heaven come after traversing hell
Phew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the sky we’ll go.

A ladder-climb up the sky beats an air drum
To mount joust and not lose to proud eagles

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

For pied-birds rent the air owed the gum-trees
We pay a life-lease in a death-pledge of song.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

A dive writes on broad-black with a chalk-edge,
In winged claw at knife-point as swoop bloods.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Here’s heaven come after traversing hell
Phew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the sky we’ll go.

The wires of human-kind are bow strung
To be tuned by us pied birds of great airs.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.


July 2014

Gatherer of Thistledown

GATHERER OF THISTLEDOWN


Goldfinch: quick as silver
on its mantle, on its collar;
fast wedgebill, seedeater,
gatherer of thistledown, it

flies up in a quick jerk
to wind-leap the air hurdles
and down to the outer twig
that flickers, hardly bends.

Goldfinches Twitter

GOLDFINCHES TWITTER

Goldfinches twitter, their
calls fill the Spring, short
messages as if bi-locating

each to each; calls twang
like wires plucked by angels
mantled in robes of yellow

as if aware of the mirror-selves
of their transfixing beauty,
they must twitter and twitter

to keep their kind birdbrained,
to know that they're not alone
to stay waked from reflection.

Anonymous, Until Its Voice

ANONYMOUS, UNTIL ITS VOICE


It is a plain Australian grey thrush,
more exactly titled a Strike-Thrush
commonly the harmonious thrush.


It's not usually noticed until it calls;
as if 'Colluricincla harmonica' is the
voice Anonymous takes as a bird.


Like sweet water between stones he's
our liquid songster on watch of terra australia
striking pleasing, glorious, melodious notes.


I once heard one way remote, way east of Alice
Springs, like cool water inside dry canyons walls;
and I heard one yesterday in my own backyard


and still am left in song echoes, feeling visited.

Rosella Calls

ROSELLA CALLS

Eastern Rosella's cry their ode
In flight out of my garden plot
As if signaling in raw Morse Code:
Dot-dot. Pause. Dot-dot.

Like a poem by Les Murray
About a way these parrots fly;
Wings open; wings shut, then open
Dot-dot. Pause. Morse Code for I.