Cassowary
July 15, 2022
Cassowary Only the emu and ostrich outgrow them, these flightless, man-sized, razored birds, scuttling through the thick leaf litter like a nightmare turkey; all wattle and claw. I hear you run at 50 K an hour, leap fences like a show-jumper, and swim like a plumed platypus. Long-lived as any cockatoo, deep-voiced as a baritone, you strode your forests these many million years. Accessorised bright blue and red, you balance on stretched palm-leaf feet, and only fight when there is no escape. But no bird can outrun the ropes of road we push into your world, those hard nets of bitumen, tightening like a noose around Queensland's neck. Huge eggs hatched for aeons before we brought pigs and dogs and cars into that humid, secret, fruitful world. However brave the male who guards the heap of leaf which hides tomorrow's clutch of many birds, he can't see us off, with our strangling wire, and our certain need for boundaries. Cassowaries wear their casques like crowns; but how long can the regal booming sound, or chicks survive, in their bright-striped down? P.S. Cottier I wrote that poem over ten years ago, and it was first published in The Canberra Times. I am republishing it as I saw my first wild cassowary earlier this week in far north Queensland, where they live. A male with a single chick revealed himself after six hours searching.
Except for the cat
February 10, 2022
The cancer riddled Staffie, the muzzle white where it was brindle once, the Great Dane who clocked up only three years (for we breed dogs too big for their strained hearts to cope) the smelly terrier who outlived them all, sitting with the bald budgie Chomp on his head (something that would never have been allowed when the dog was alive), the coin-sized islands of terrapin, the scurry of guinea pigs, the cat that adopted you even though you don’t like cats, the many goldfish that floated to the tops of tanks, all come to greet you as you travel over to the other side. They bite and scratch and peck, and the ballooned goldfish push inside your throat, and you feel the choking although you are dead, and you realise that the animals did not enjoy their lives being stunted, to fit into your notion of pet like a blistered foot caught in a too small shoe. Except for the cat, who never gave a shit.
PS Cottier
A fun piece of prose (poetry) in a vaguely horrific way. As an editor, I’m amazed by how many poems contain cats. Here’s my contribution.
Glossy black cockatoo
January 16, 2022
Spotted two glossy black cockatoos down at the coast, feasting in a (sort of) suburban yard. Is seeing them purely a good thing, given that so much of the bush burnt recently? Have they been driven beyond their comfort zone, looking for casuarina? The lovely photo of the female cockatoo was taken by a neighbour.
Trees gone glossy gentle creaking of pods displacement PS Cottier
Tuesday poem: Where they go
December 8, 2021
Where they go Full calls have no place among the clipped hedges, the solid garages, or mere carports of suburbia. There is indeed a farm where plucky roosters go, invisible to the eyes of those who dispatched them with handy axe, or squeamish vet. In the sky the boy-chooks crow, show their bright red crowns, scratch the earth. Executed for the lack of eggs, they hatch sweet cockadoodle-doos to the moon. The stars catch gleams of manic eye, the triumphant shake of crimson wattle. PS Cottier
That’s a simple poem that was recently short-listed for a competition. (There are monthly competitions run by the publication Positive Words, for tiny stories and short poems.) I find it amazing how many people keep chooks but don’t think too much about the lack of male birds, all dispatched because they don’t meet our supposed needs. I’ll shut up now before I go the full vegan, and get back to perusing the 300 or so poems submitted for The Canberra Times.
Tuesday poem: Limits
October 26, 2021
Limits ‘Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live.’ Pope Francis Four months ago the trees looked like trees drawn in charcoal by a depressed artist — simple strokes of black connecting earth to noon-time grey, throat-choking, skies. Now, watch the festoons of green circling the trunks, as if strewn by the world’s worst exterior decorator. Such vivid newness, almost artificial in its neon promise. And yet, such trees have known blazes many years, lightning-spat, or most carefully set, by those who shaped the land, farmed with fire, forty thousand years or more. We comfort ourselves, forget that this mega-blaze, man-made, was the very opposite of skill. We have changed the seasons, charged the air, dried the possibilities of rain into a parched riverbed of loss. Yes, the trees still push out leaves. Frail canopy above dead mounds of wombat, of lyre-bird-less, song-lost, ground. The reassurance of regeneration this time asks us how many more times green can possibly appear. If next year, and the next, another blaze exceeds all history, will even gumtrees stay gloomed — dead sticks we poked into a lessened land? PS Cottier
Everyone is pleased to see the bush regenerating after a fire, but how many times can it do so after the mega fires that climate change brings?
PS Cottier 