for Meredith
Shame on the aldermen who locked
the Peacock in a dirty cage!
His blue and copper sheens are mocked
by habit, hopelessness and age.
The weary Sunday families
along their gravelled paths repeat
the pattern of monotonies
that he treads out with restless feet.
And yet the Peacock shines alone;
and if one metal feather fall
another grows where that was grown.
Love clothes him still, in spite of all.
How pure the hidden spring must rise
that time and custom cannot stain!
It speaks its joy again—again.
Perhaps the aldermen are wise.
Sweet and small the blue wren
whistles to his gentle hen,
“The creek is full, the day is gold,
the tale of love is never told.
Fear not, my love, nor fly away,
for safe, safe in the blackthorn-tree
we shall build our nest today.
Trust to me, oh trust to me.”
Cobwebs they gather and dry grass,
greeting each other as they pass
up to the nest and down again,
the blue wren and the brown wren.
They seek and carry far and near,
down the bank and up the hill,
until that crystal note they hear
that strikes them dumb and holds them still.
Great glorious passion of a voice—
sure all that hear it must rejoice.
But in the thorn-bush silent hide
the nest-builders side by side.
“The blue wren’s nestlings and his wife,
and he himself, that sprig of blue,
I shall kill, and hang them safe—
the blackthorn spears shall run them through.”
Still and still the blue wren
sits beside his cowering hen.
There they wait like stone by stone
until the butcher-bird is gone.
Then soft and sweet the blue wren
twitters to his anxious hen,
“Trust to me, oh trust to me;
I know another blackthorn-tree.”
The moss-rose and the palings made
a solemn and a waiting shade
where eagerly the mother pressed
a sheltering curve into her nest.
Her tranced eye, her softened stare,
warned me when I saw her there,
and perfect as the grey nest’s round,
three frail and powdered eggs I found.
My mother called me there one day.
Beneath the nest the eggshells lay,
and in it throbbed the triple greed
of one incessant angry need.
Those yellow gapes, those starveling cries,
how they disquieted my eyes!—
the shapeless furies come to be
from shape’s most pure serenity.
Fierce with hunger and cold
all night in the windy tree
the kestrel to the sun cries,
“Oh bird in the egg of the sea,
“break out, and tower, and hang
high, oh most high,
and watch for the running mouse
with your unwearying eye;
“and I shall hover and hunt,
and I shall see him move,
and I like a bolt of power
shall seize him from above.
“Break from your blue shell,
you burning Bird or God,
and light me to my kill—
and you shall share his blood.”
The currawong has shallow eyes—
bold shallow buttons of yellow glass
that see all round his sleek black skull.
Small birds sit quiet when he flies;
mothers of nestlings cry Alas!
He is a gangster, his wife’s a moll.
But I remember long ago
(a child beside the seldom sea)
the currawongs as wild as night
quarrelling, talking, crying so,
in the scarlet-tufted coral-tree;
and past them that blue stretch of light,
the ocean with its dangerous song.
Robber then and robber still,
he cries now with the same strange word
(currawong—currawong)
that from those coxcomb trees I heard.
Take my bread and eat your fill,
bold, cruel and melodious bird.
The swamp pheasant was wide awake
when the dawn-star came up new.
He scrambled up the garden gate
and made green tracks in the web-white dew.
All round the lawn he ran and peered;
he found a lizard under a stone;
he found a tiny wart-eyed toad—
one scuffle and it was gone.
Then out came our cat Violet,
one eye half-closed from many a fight.
He combed from his whisker a mouse’s fur,
and breathed the air with calm delight.
The swamp pheasant looks and sees
a tiger made in pheasant-size—
runs to the fence and scrambles out,
while Violet squints his scornful eyes.
And I lean out and laugh to see
that queer old woman cross the street,
holding her brown skirts high behind
and scuttling on her long black feet.
Their tiny torrent of flight
sounds in the trees like rain,
flicking the leaves to the light—
a scattered handful of grain,
the thornbills little as bees.
I hear in the blowing trees
the sudden tune of their song.
Pray that the hawk not sees,
who has scanned the wind so long
for his small living food.
Oh let no enemies
drink the quick wine of blood
that leaps in their pulse of praise.
Wherever a trap is set
may they slip through the mesh of the net.
Nothing should do them wrong.
Carved out of strength, the furious kite
shoulders off the wind’s hate.
The black mark that bars his white
is the pride and hunger of Cain.
Perfect, precise, the angry calm
of his closed body, that snow-storm—
of his still eye that threatens harm.
Hunger and force his beauty made
and turned a bird to a knife-blade.
Once as I travelled through a quiet evening,
I saw a pool, jet-black and mirror-still.
Beyond, the slender paperbarks stood crowding;
each on its own white image looked its fill,
and nothing moved but thirty egrets wading—
thirty egrets in a quiet evening.
Once in a lifetime, lovely past believing,
your lucky eyes may light on such a pool.
As though for many years I had been waiting,
I watched in silence, till my heart was full
of clear dark water, and white trees unmoving,
and, whiter yet, those thirty egrets wading.
The dove purrs—over and over the dove
purrs its declaration. The wind’s tone
changes from tree to tree, the creek on stone
alters its sob and fall, but still the dove
goes insistently on, telling its love
“I could eat you.”
And in captivity, they say, doves do.
Gentle, methodical, starting with the feet
(the ham-pink succulent toes
on their thin stems of rose),
baring feather by feather the wincing meat:
“I could eat you.”
That neat suburban head, that suit of grey,
watchful conventional eye and manicured claw—
these also rhyme with us. The doves play
on one repetitive note that plucks the raw
helpless nerve, their soft “I do. I do.
I could eat you.”
Beneath him slid the furrows of the sea;
against his sickle-skill the air divided;
he used its thrust and current easily.
He trusted all to air: the flesh that bred him
was worn against it to a blade-thin curving
made all for flight; air’s very creatures fed him.
Such pride as this, once fallen, there’s no saving.
Whatever struck him snapped his stretch of wing.
He came to earth at last, Icarus diving.
Like a contraption of feathers, bone and string,
his storm-blue wings hung useless. Yet his eyes
lived in his wreckage—head still strove to rise
and turn towards the lost impossible spring.
Strangers are easily put out of countenance,
and we were strangers in that place;
camped among trees we had no names for;
not knowing the local customs.
And those big grey birds, how they talked about us!
They hung head-down from branches and peered.
They spread their tawny wings like fans,
and came so close we could have touched them;
staring with blunt amusement.
It was ridiculous to feel embarrassed.
Of that camp I remember the large wild violets,
the sound of the creek on stones,
the wind-combed grass, the tree-trunks
wrinkled and grey like elephant-legs all round us;
and those apostle-birds, so rude to strangers,
so self-possessed and clannish,
we were glad when they flew away.
Loquats are cold as winter suns.
Among rough leaves their clusters grow
like oval beads of cloudy amber,
or small fat flames of birthday candles.
Parrots, when the winter dwindles
their forest fruits and seeds, remember
where the swelling loquats grow,
how chill and sweet their thin juice runs,
and shivering in the morning cold
we draw the curtains back and see
the lovely greed of their descending,
the lilt of flight that blurs their glories,
and warm our eyes upon the lories
and the rainbow-parrots landing.
There’s not a fruit on any tree
to match their crimson, green and gold.
To see them cling and sip and sway,
loquats are no great price to pay.
Along the road the magpies walk
with hands in pockets, left and right.
They tilt their heads, and stroll and talk.
In their well-fitted black and white
they look like certain gentlemen
who seem most nonchalant and wise
until their meal is served—and then
what dashing beaks, what greedy eyes!
But not one man that I have heard
throws back his head in such a song
of grace and praise—no man nor bird.
Their greed is brief; their joy is long.
For each is born with such a throat
as thanks his God with every note.
Walking one lukewarm, lamp-black night I heard
a yard from me his harsh rattle of warning,
and in a landing-net of torchlight saw him crouch—
the devil, small but dangerous. My heart’s lurch
betrayed me to myself. But I am learning:
I can distinguish: the devil is no bird.
A bird with a broken breast. But what a stare
he fronted me with!—his look abashed my own.
He was all eyes, furious, meant to wound.
And I, who meant to heal, took in my hand
his depth of down, his air-light delicate bone,
his heart in the last extreme of pain and fear.
From nerve to nerve I felt the circuit blaze.
Along my veins his anguish beat; his eyes
flared terror into mine and cancelled time,
and the black whirlpool closed over my head
and clogged my throat with the cry that knows no aid.
Far down beneath the reach of succouring light
we fought, we suffered, we were sunk in night.
So elegant he is and neat
from round black head to slim black feet!
He sways and flirts upon the fence,
his collar clean as innocence.
The city lady looks and cries
“Oh charming bird with dewdrop eyes,
how kind of you to sing that song!”
But what a pity—she is wrong.
“Sweet-pretty-creature”—yes, but who
is the one he sings it to?
Not me—not you.
The furry moth, the gnat perhaps,
on which his scissor-beak snip-snaps.
Funnel-web spider, snake and octopus,
pitcher-plant and vampire-bat and shark—
these are cold water on an easy faith.
Look at them, but don’t linger.
If we stare too long, something looks back at us;
something gazes through from underneath;
something crooks a very dreadful finger
down there in an unforgotten dark.
Turn away then, and look up at the sky.
There sails that old clever Noah’s Ark,
the well-turned, well-carved pelican
with his wise comic eye;
he turns and wheels down, kind as an ambulance-driver,
to join his fleet. Pelicans rock together,
solemn as clowns in white on a circus-river,
meaning: this world holds every sort of weather.
It was a morning blue as ocean’s mirror,
and strong and warm the wind was blowing.
Along the shore a flock of terns went flying,
their long white wings as clean as pearl.
Inland among the boulders of grey coral
their mates upon the eggs sat waiting.
A shoal of fishes hurried by the island
and the terns plunged into the shoal.
The sea was pocked with sudden silver fountains
where the birds dived, so swift and clever;
and some rose with a flash of fish and water
as sunlight broke on splash and scale;
but some, we saw, stayed down and did not rise.
That shoal the big bonito harried,
and they took fish and diving bird together.
One tern rose like a bloodied sail,
and a bonito leapt to make its capture.
All morning it went on, that slaughter,
with white birds diving, obstinate with hunger;
and some would rise, and some would fail.
The morning was as gentle as a pearl,
the sea was pocked with sudden silver fountains;
you would not guess the blood, unless you saw it,
that the waves washed from feather and from scale.
Brown bird with the silver eyes,
fly down and teach me to sing.
I am alone, I will not
touch you or move.
I am only thirsty for love
and the clear stream of your voice
and the brown curve of your wing
and the cold of your silver eyes.
Yet though I hung my head
and did not look or move,
he felt my thirst and was gone.
Though not a word I said,
he would not give me a song.
My heart sounded too strong;
too desert looked my love.
Each certain kind of weather or of light
has its own creatures. Somewhere else they wait
as though they but inhabited heat or cold,
twilight or dawn, and knew no other state.
Then at their time they come, timid or bold.
So when the long drought-winds, sandpaper-harsh,
were still, and the air changed, and the clouds came,
and other birds were quiet in prayer or fear,
these knew their hour. Before the first far flash
lit up, or the first thunder spoke its name,
in heavy flight they came, till I could hear
the wild black cockatoos, tossed on the crest
of their high trees, crying the world’s unrest.
Once in a winter killing as its war,
and settled in the heart as sharp as sleet,
under a trellised rose hook-thorned and bare
that twined its whips and flogged the cruel air,
the rainbow-bird lay fallen at my feet.
Yes, fallen, fallen like the spring’s delight,
that bird that turned too late to find the spring.
The cold had struck him spinning from its height;
his cobweb-plumes, his breast too neat and slight
to beat that wind back, and his twisted wing.
And I stood looking. All of me was chilled.
My face was silent as a mask of wood,
and I had thought my very core was killed.
But he in his soft colours lay more cold
even than my heart. He met me like a word
I needed—pity? love? —the rainbow-bird.
Night after night the rounding moon
rose like a bushfire through the air.
Night after night the swans came in—
the lake at morning rocked them there.
The inland fired the western wind
from plains bared by a year-long drought.
Only the coastal lakes were kind
until that bitter year ran out.
Black swans shadowed the blaze of moon
as they came curving down the sky.
On hills of night the red stars burned
like sparks blown when the wind is high.
On rushing wings the black swans turned
sounding aloud their desolate cry.
It was after a day’s rain:
the street facing the west
was lit with growing yellow;
the black road gleamed.
First one child looked and saw
and told another.
Face after face, the windows
flowered with eyes.
It was like a long fuse lighted,
the news travelling.
No one called out loudly;
everyone said “Hush.”
The light deepened; the wet road
answered in daffodil colours,
and down its centre
walked the two tall herons.
Stranger than wild birds, even,
what happened on those faces:
suddenly believing in something,
they smiled and opened.
Children thought of fountains,
circuses, swans feeding;
women remembered words
spoken when they were young.
Everyone said “Hush”;
no one spoke loudly;
but suddenly the herons
rose and were gone. The light faded.
Over the west side of this mountain,
that’s lyrebird country.
I could go down there, they say, in the early morning,
and I’d see them, I’d hear them.
Ten years, and I have never gone.
I’ll never go.
I’ll never see the lyrebirds—
the few, the shy, the fabulous,
the dying poets.
I should see them, if I lay there in the dew:
first a single movement
like a waterdrop falling, then stillness,
then a brown head, brown eyes,
a splendid bird, bearing
like a crest the symbol of his art,
the high symmetrical shape of the perfect lyre.
I should hear that master practising his art.
No, I have never gone.
Some things ought to be left secret, alone;
some things—birds like walking fables—
ought to inhabit nowhere but the reverence of the heart.
In summer they can afford their independence,
down in the gullies, in the folds of forest;
but with the early frosts they’re here again—
hopping like big toy birds, as round as pullets,
handsomely green and speckled, but somehow comic—
begging their bread. A domestic,
quarrelling, amateur troupe.
Ordinary birds with ordinary manners,
uninteresting as pigeons;
but, like the toad, they have a secret.
Look—the young male bird—
see his eye’s perfect mineral blaze of blue.
The winter sea’s not purer
than that blue flash set in a bird’s head.
Then I remember
how ritually they worship that one colour.
Blue chips of glass, blue rag, blue paper,
the heads of my grape-hyacinths,
I found in their secret bower; and there are dances
done in the proper season,
for birth, initiation, marriage and perhaps death.
Seven years, some say, those green-brown birds
elect blue for their colour
and dance for it, their eyes round as the sea’s horizons,
blue as grape-hyacinths.
And when those seven years are served?
See, there he flies, the old one,
the male made perfect—
black in the shadow, but in the caressing sun
bluer, more royal than the ancient sea.
Right to the edge of his forest
the tourists come.
He learns the scavenger’s habits
with scrap and crumb—
his forests shrunk, he lives
on what the moment gives:
pretends, in mockery,
to beg our charity.
Cunning and shy one must be
to snatch one’s bread
from oafs whose hands are quicker
with stones instead.
He apes the backyard bird,
half-proud and half-absurd,
sheltered by his quick wit,
he sees and takes his bit.
Ash-black, wattles of scarlet,
and careful eye,
he hoaxes the ape, the ogre,
with mimicry.
Scornfully, he will eat
thrown crust and broken meat
till suddenly—“See, oh see!
The turkey’s in the tree.”
The backyard bird is stupid;
he trusts and takes.
But this one’s wiles are wary
to guard against the axe:
escaping, neat and pat,
into his habitat.
Charred log and shade and stone
accept him. He is gone.
And here’s a bird the poet
may ponder over,
whose ancient forest-meanings
no longer grant him cover;
who, circumspect yet proud,
like yet unlike the crowd,
must cheat its chucklehead
to throw—not stones, but bread.
One spring when life itself was happiness,
he called and called across the orange-trees
his two strange syllables; and clouds of perfume
followed along the hesitating breeze.
And when he calls, the spring has come again,
and the old joy floods up in memory.
Yet his sad foster-kin cannot forget
the wrong he does them—Cain from his infancy.
Dark wary rebel, migrant without a home
except the spring, bird whom so many hate,
voice of one tune and only one—yet come.
In fear yet boldly, come and find your mate.
Against their anger, outcast by them all,
choose your one love and call your single call—
the endless tale you cannot cease to tell,
half-question, half-reply—Koel! Koel!
Charles Harpur in his journals long ago
(written in hope and love, and never printed)
recorded the birds of his time’s forest—
birds long vanished with the fallen forest—
described in copperplate on unread pages.
The scarlet satin-bird, swung like a lamp in berries,
he watched in love, and then in hope described it.
There was a bird, blue, small, spangled like dew.
All now are vanished with the fallen forest.
And he, unloved, past hope, was buried,
who helped with proud stained hands to fell the forest,
and set those birds in love on unread pages;
yet thought himself immortal, being a poet.
And is he not immortal, where I found him,
in love and hope along his careful pages?—
the poet vanished, in the vanished forest,
among his brightly tinted extinct birds?
Wild and impermanent
as the sea-foam blown,
the dotterel keeps its distance
and runs alone.
Bare beach, salt wind,
its loved solitude,
hold all that it asks
of shelter and food.
I saw its single egg
dropped in the sand,
with neither straw nor wall
to warm or defend;
and the new-hatched chick,
like a thistle’s pale down,
fled and crouched quiet
as sand or as stone.
Water’s edge, land’s edge
and edge of the air—
the dotterel chooses
to live nowhere.
It runs, but not in fear,
and its thin high call
is like a far bugle
that troubles the soul.
On the bough of blue summer
hangs one crimson berry.
Like the blood of a lover
is the breast of the lory.
The blood-drinking butcher-birds
pray and sing together.
They long to gather from his breast
the red of one feather.
But “The heart’s red is my reward,”
the old crow cries
“I’ll wear his colour on my black
the day the lory dies.”