Birds At Bundanon
7 a.m.
A cool walk before
snakes sun themselves on the road –
whipbird to wake me,
bellbird to charm me into
hope; the raven’s rasp adds edge.
Forest
Warnings and warblings,
bells, pipes, whips… Birds amplify
the silence; their calls,
borne on the wind’s leafy roar,
lodge in the mind, the marrow.
Behold this bower
His trophies tend toward
the lapis reaches of blue:
a paint-tube top, silk
tassel, shreds from a balloon.
And one mauve periwinkle.
Crimson Rosellas
Once shot by farmers
for their way with seeds. Loved by
satin bowerbirds
for their tail-feathers’ cobalt:
magnetic pieces of sky.
Kestrel
A visitation
from a high aristocrat
with unspoken rights;
an angler casting himself,
line and hook, into the depths.
Heron in high flight
The mindful slowness
of an artist, a lover
as wingtips stroke air.
Its gifts to life: dignity,
grace without cease, quietude.
The friarbirds
with their black cowls, their
whacky vitality, prance
between boughs, sip from
scribbles of yellow, engage
in vertiginous matings.
Willie wagtail nesting
She’s embarked upon
a stationary voyage,
that cobwebbed grass cup
a boat unswayed by the wind,
jet eyes dreamily alert.
Blackbird
They hold me in thrall –
his songs with their quicksilver
chanciness, their truth,
each vocal pause bringing balm,
before I sleep, when I wake.
The owl’s call
– so unlocated,
so hushed, so piercing: the night’s
own voice – hooks your heart
with an eerie talon, pulls
with unanswerable force.
Midnight
Diamond-strewn velvet:
an opera theatre’s
ceiling; all voices
stilled, but for the raven’s rogue
tenor, the barn owl’s weirding.
In the small hours, waking
Wingbeats, starlit air.
I breathe away a dream owl’s
sweeping and swooping
but keep this image: blackbird
on a bough, songless, waiting.
Diane Fahey
Diane is an established poet and a regular contributor to Tinteán
The poems will form part of a book of tanka, titled November Journal, to be published by Whitmore Press at the end of the year.
Tinteán 