Song of the Two-toned Invisible Scrub-Bird
The distant scrub breaks out
with a loop of ever repeated
ventriloquil two-tone mournful song
presumably throated by some grief-stricken
grey bird permanently bound
to its camouflage of
faded widows weeds that match
the note-bending a-chordal down scale
that sets a soundtrack to the elusive
unsaid something that there is out there
in and about this much winged-over
inner life of desert Australia
of a bird you go looking for but never
do get to see, like some will-o-wisp
bird-angel carrying the country's elegiac messages
with an echo-amplified presence made more palpable
by this shyly-canny clandestine Scrub-bird's
rendering of its syllabic metre
into these slow-drawn out yet penetrating
aural whispers, soft bells that ring yet
in your mind for ever after like
some lost word of a forgotten password
to a place you don't yet
know how to enter.
No comments:
Post a Comment