7 days, poems & photography. Oct 3

You have to be African to be Sacred

The Sacred Ibis, now the Australian white ibis,
is commonly called the Bin Chicken, a quick
learner and a recent urban immigrant .

One stands on the tallest tree in the mangroves
surveying the thick weft of grey green canopy.
The lens waits, approaches for the composition,

focuses in a wooden frame of dead branches,
waits for the bird to turn its head for a clear
view of that sickle curved Ottoman bill.

Nature is unlike art in terms of its product – what we in general know it by. The difference is that it not only created, an external object with a history, and so belonging to a past; but also creating in the present, as we experience it. As we watch it is so to speak rewriting, reformulating, rephotographing itself. John Fowles, The Tree, The Tree, Aurum Press, 1979, p37.