How Canberra 

Parking at the AIS, pink imps called to me, or rather, grey imps wearing pink floppy hats.  Gang-gangs opening gates in the sky. Walked to the pool, touching the bronze Guy Boyd woman poised on a plinth, the magic saint of all bad swimmers. Crawled through my twenty laps, more snail-stroke than free-style. Back to the car past groups of kids, past a well-known former athlete, past the memory of Covid marked by a discarded mask. Coffee at Tilley’s and more cockatoos, swinging below powerlines like avian punchlines, yellow fringes tickling the clouds.

PS Cottier

So a little translation for those who don’t live in Canberra; the AIS is the Australian Institute of Sport. Tilley’s is a venerable cafe in Lyneham, a suburb in the inner north of Canberra. And gang-gangs are a type of cockatoo. They are the faunal emblem of the Australian Capital Territory. An absolutely beautiful bird which can be seen quite frequently in Canberra, but which are overall becoming quite rare. Unlike the cocky in the photo.

Poem: Eggshell garden

November 10, 2022

Half an egg, hidden in a drawer,
a tiny half-skull among the socks.
She gathers dirt, careful not to leave
a tell-tale trail, fills her tiny cup,
waits until dandelions are blown
into wishes, wraps a seed in tissue.
She puts her garden on the windowsill,
a promise behind the curtains,
which are printed with pink roses
and stringy effusions of lavender.
Sprouting towards the light,
a tiny green finger pokes into being,
and the eventual flower is more
dandekitten than anything fierce. 
It purrs in her mind, her flower
wattle-like yellow, punctuating
her bedroom with a freedom of glee.

PS Cottier

Somewhere there’s a photo of me as a child holding a plant which is growing inside an eggshell. That memory inspired this poem.

Poem: No genie, no wish

September 2, 2022

No genie, no wish

I thought it was a safe dwelling,
this huge shell, bright blue,
blooming on sand.
Not petty house for me, no
scrummaging for dangerous weeks.
My belly needs support,
is un-calcified, tending to slump.
I need other species to form
places for me to hide, to live,
and from where I scavenge,
daily, for minute bites of food.
Imagine my joy, at this mansion,
the cavity through which I pushed
an eager few centimetres of crab.
And now I find myself trapped,
unable to live in this blue world.
When I die, I send out a cry,
not in words but scent,
telling other hermits that a shell
has become vacant, and so,
how many others will meet inside
this treacherous, plastic tomb?
A million such containers
cover the beaches’ sheets of sand,
a kaleidoscope of pain.
Fake promises of security,
washing up with very wave.
I am a message, trapped inside
a blue bottle of disaster,
an artificial gift of doom.

PS Cottier

Hermit crabs are dying inside plastic and glass waste washed up on Australia’s remote islands: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/05/what-happens-when-hermit-crabs-confuse-plastic-trash-shells-an-avalanche-death/

Cassowary

July 15, 2022

Dave Kimble, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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.

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