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
