Bird

Warm for December but cool in their down

Birds, shape of riverbend, take the boardwalk.

In a grove of young eucalypts birds are soft wind

Move through foliage to steep banks beyond.

Most noticeable birds feed on what’s about grass,

Scoot in and out of their set-up amidst rushes.

Sounds sharp as sunlight accommodate the air

Hop from stem to stem, trip across the sky.

Interruption to meditation is the machine,

It jars starts alive with its death noise

Constant anomaly till its job ends shut.

Silence does not silence birds’ re-entry,

The clock passes an hour where they frolic,

Pack their things, watch humans, or go upstream.

Water

Falls fast or increases driving pulpits and plaints,

Vocabulary of my mind. Great mess of every word stops

Before sight of sea, rockpools filling, stream rivulets.

There are no words. Only colossal continuous movement

Over reefs across sand aisles below where I sit.

How we have changed in imagining tides rising

Now we stare at the news, polar melt no rainfall, in this

“most dangerous bushfire season in one hundred years.”

Saltwater courses around bases, rests in honeycomb rock

Millions of years old, both elements. Mind rests with its backward

And forwards, my words a foreground of distraction. No words.

Meditation includes walking down for a swim, sand soft

Underfoot. Water goes wherever it can and I stroll through it,

Warm for December but cool on the skin.

Surf

After lunch I find a sandy seat amidst pigface

And sand grass where birds flit bush to bush,

The swell of the sea white waves surge in lines

Along the coast collide or overtake one another,

The sounds are huge tell of earth’s great scale

Sunday swimmers struggling with undertow

Blues of water rise and are swamped white foam

Big breakers but all I hear is the inexorable obedience

To physics that makes and unmakes

Large surf strong rips gnarly pits,

Some surfers work it walk it near the point

Who tell reef from water turmoil, waves rise

Each somehow a little different from the last

Fall fast or crash into dripping pulpits and plinths.

Aureole

This is not a bushfire, it’s sign

Substance of the world dried to combustion

Leaf, limb, bark and bole, non-stop consumption

Bright outcome of sun-filled fun-filled design.

This is not a leader, a mere liar

Full-time, a trump kid, a policy crime,

A chief executive of end times.

His eyeballs flame with a lordly ire.

This is not a bushfire, it’s physics

Its containment line the edge of my screen

Oxygenated extreme to drastic.

This is not a leader, he’s a clickbait

Waiting with bad news, how good is plain mean,

A smiling emoji aureoled with hate.

Unchristian

Sieving every second’s suitable remorse

Righteousness all theirs to insist on

Identifying who is unchristian

And who of this crowd is on the right course.

Reading points of law from old translations

Even God looks flat on the page;

Throwing the Good Book in a perfect rage

At imperfect pagans and mere unchristians.

Selecting the elect, who stays or leaves,

Heaven a place for winners, no fails,

Harbours them, their rightful rewards receive.

Scourging exiles, mocking their pretensions

To freedom, on isles of wire and nails

Is probably, as it were, unchristian.

Arms

To take up arms against a sea of troubles

Look through glass darkly at sixties décor

Was my first sight of the more that’s in store,

NGV weekends, the Melbourne bubble.

Tiepolo arms of Cleopatra

Dissolving her pearl earring forever,

Pissarro dashes by half too clever,

Balzac’s grand sweep was Rodin’s blockbuster.

Or favourites visited on school excursions

The Asian Department’s multi-armed gods,

Walter Withers’ blue, Charles Conder’s versions,

The Leonard French ceiling kaleidoscope,

Fred Williams’ blobs, Arthur Boyd’s oddbods,

Armfuls of Percevals behind glass or rope.

Of

Borne of takeover, photos of nightlamps,

Stories of birthdays, bedrooms of blessing,

Family of finds, classrooms of interest,

Love of likelihood of longevity,

Questions of gesture, fractals of nature,

Companions of day, strangers of streets,

Handspans of knowledge, canines of cutedom,

Murmurs of mortality, mind of maze,

Machines of plenty, robots of ruin,

Murals of water, archways of lightbeam,

Shake-ups of nervous systems of silence,

Grid points of bomb sites, foot wounds of size large,

Entrances of exits of entrances,

Arms of oblivion, seas of trouble.