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.