Winter Tales

Hosted a fun BRWF event – a fundraiser – Saturday 7pm 10 August 2013 – Bellingen Memorial Hall, Winter Tales (not as funny but more PC than Seth MacFarlane).

Saturday Aug 10

Our feathers and our wings, our bodies’ strength

Are quite unequal to the journey’s length.
Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

6.10am

Red light through the trees shifts to orange, as the shy

swamp wallaby springs out of our garden and bounces

back into the forest, almost like a plane trying to take off.

3:20pm

The rustling stops us in our/on the track(s)

in the undergrowth darkness, movement of leaves,

the eyes slowly adjusting, a ball of fluff, dark chestnut brown

with the bright creamy line of the oversized bill gaping

following the whirlwind of leaves being excavated

and tossed into the air. After a few minutes

mother comes into view, a Logrunner with her orange bib

who bows to feed her fledgling, one day imagining

wings that soar perhaps, someone, might anyhow

thinking the grass is greener . . .

9:15pm

Reading a poem in the Memorial Hall, asking the audience

to close their eyes . . . “the golden Regent Bowerbird

and volatile Scarlet Honeyeater, but it is the haptic

and aural that interest you – a White-throated Treecreeper

tapping lightly . . .

10:55pm

On the Bellingen road, lights on full beam travelling at eighty

in a hundred, a flash of white fingers as a Barn Owl

banks sharply away from this heavy blue weapon

my foot about to lift off to hit the brake, too late

it was so close, we found one dead fresh kill by the side

of the road up to Dorrigo. Roadkill is most people’s view.

No matter how far the birds fly, very few sanctuaries remain

free from habitat loss, cats and dogs, cars and poisons,

love is in their song and colours.