I can hear a Sugar Glider bouncing around the bush behind me. Half a moon plays hide and seek above the forest. It’s fifty minutes before sunrise, but humid, our warmest morning so far. Is that why Miilba is in a lazy mood?
Missing you already, you and the Pied Oystercatchers, scurrying around the rocky elbow and the Striated Heron, hunched stone with an ambush technique. And all the invisibilities – the zephyr touch, the sea-taste walls, the opulent solitude.
A mackerel sky is strewn through her waters and Eos is blushing. Is this important, or unimportant?
Helios wakes, my Helios, my Jaaningbirrany Helios. I know he spreads his gift around, but in this eureka he wakes the day with wonderful panache (blazing too excitedly in daytime’s core).
I turn the generous curve as the season’s first cicadas start winding up the sound boxes in their abdomens in the reserve behind me, emitting a quiet, high-pitched version of what is to come. These are probably the small brown ones. Green Grocers will be next, the name dating back to the 19th Century. What names do the Gumbaynggirr have/had for all the species they would have eaten?
I’ll miss the mob of kangaroos I slow for on the edge of the reserve. The joey stands in the middle of the dirt road and stares. As I inch forward, he darts to the left. His mother who is standing on the left bounds to the right. Thy nearly collide.
The driveway chants with the din of lorikeets in wonderful collisions with all the other birds on their dawn chorus, in a room we call the garden.
I am only going for a month, but it could be longer with Covid in the air.
Love is bread. Love is water.
(I forget all about Glasgow while alone in this estuary).
