Tuesday poem: Budgerigar
April 9, 2013
Budgerigar
Ten million green commas punctuate blue sky,
quick breaths of swooping wonder, multiplied.
Water-hole is your target; liquid rope pulls you
and the whole emerald sky is diving,
as miniature bodies scoop down to pool.
Your individual markings have taken you
further than native flight; outside the Louvre
I saw you, cold, trying to break in, as pointillist
as Pissarro, but so acrylic in your finish.
Proud but damp escapee from French balcony,
regretting the lost seed and the found liberty.
Plump and fresh, I have heard you were good eating,
a winging fast food charred to a turn;
as far from stringy battery chook as fingers in the fire.
Most know you singly: whistling in cages,
bowing and bobbing, rattling plastic mirrors.
Driven mad you ring and ring chink-chinky bells
or make love to that hard, hard-to-get reflection.
What joy to see you
just once, as you swoop,
one stitch amongst the tapestry,
a blade of grass in feathered turf carpet,
magically landing,
transforming dreary waterside
with that fallen sward of Eire.
Swift dragon of twenty million wings,
fluorescing with your simple, beak-filled joys.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this poem quite a while back, but haven’t found the right place for it. Until now! Budgerigars live in huge numbers in inland Australia. Apparently they are our most successful animal export (excluding the woolly things). They are, I assume, no longer exported, but their proclivity for breeding makes them the world’s most popular cage bird. I’m sure they’d rather be back in the wild, if birds were capable of such choices.
For further poetry, click this feather, which is most definitely not that of a budgie:
Communal poem unfolds, unwraps and reveals itself…
April 3, 2013
It’s great to write to a strict deadline sometimes. I’m just about to post a stanza of the Third Tuesday Poem Birthday Poem. Hopefully it will be better than that title, which I just made up. It’s actually called the Third Birthday Communal ‘Jazz’ Poem, to emphasise the aspect of improvisation.
So dog, what rhymes with ‘jazzy’?
Click this feather to see the poem develop…emerge…crystallise…meld…cook…,no no no; rise, Phoenix-like from the unashed and smokeless computer screen. Mmm, perhaps I need to try that sentence again?
For a person who usually works in isolation, this is quite a rare process. I’m going to go for it…whatever that may mean.
Visit the Tuesday Poem site a few times this week and see how things are going.
PS Cottier 