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.