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