Poem: Plains-wanderer
April 3, 2023
Plains-wanderer Pedionomus torquatus Someone took a quail and put it on a rack. It hasn’t stopped being surprised, and looks around comically, this tiny survivor, this left-over, balanced on gum-boot yellow legs. Or perhaps it is shocked by all the sheep, the cats, the fox, the foul apparatus introduced by recent arrivals, cockier than any cockatoo? Plains wanderer likes the quiet life; endless stubbly land it punctuates like a soft bracket. Last of its kind, all it needs is space unruffled, except by herbs, and the female’s russet red, blooming like a tiny sun, as she calls to smaller moon of male. PS Cottier
JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This year I was lucky enough to see the Plains-wanderer in the wild, which is truly a unique bird. The female is much larger than the male in this species, a bit similar to some birds of prey. But it is a truly harmless bird, and it was quite moving to see it hiding in the grass.
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.
Tuesday poem: Pages like football fields
March 19, 2012
Pages like football fields
People try to bring home
what is happening in the Amazon
and they reach for metaphors, like tools.
They hope to find the metaphor
to push reluctant minds into consciousness.
A metaphor as useful as a chainsaw
that fells a thousand-year-old tree.
Some people turn to mother
and speak of the earth’s bosom.
Or of a thick green girdle
(Mother is an unfashionable dame)
of wombs and deep forest fecundity.
When they really work themselves up,
they speak of raping the earth,
which must equate to removing a girdle
In such people’s minds.
Still others take a sporting approach,
calculating the number of football fields
lost to the dozer each minute.
Suggesting that if we only blew a magic whistle,
the infringement would cease, fair play break out.
Such people tackle issues head on,
so long as the goals are clear, and the weather fine,
they’ll take a punt at converting you.
And of course the difficulty is that what happens
Is no metaphor at all, nor a smiling simile.
What is lost, can not be substituted.
It is this process of substitution
which allows some to think money
when they see that thousand year tree.
Just as others call starvation, debt.
These things stand in for each other,
support each other.
That is the problem with minting too many metaphors.
They prop up things that should be brought down.
However, let me present one more.
If this page were the rainforest,
the letters its constituent parts:
jaguar, fungus, creeper, human,
then in ten fleet years (or fewer)
the man who borrowed this book from the library
would have ripped it out, jaggedly.
By doing so, he has caused
all the book to unravel.
Slothfully it started,
leaves dropped daily,
the spine collapsed.
Now it is not a book.
punctuation is gone
pages and w rds have g
P.S. Cottier
From my first poetry book, The Glass Violin.
For further poems, please visit the Tuesday Poem site by clicking the feather:
Hip hop before hip hop
November 22, 2011
Australia’s loss of frog species is, I believe, the worst in the world. We have lost the gastric brooding frog. The corroboree frog, a species that lives in the few really cold parts of the country, is the subject of directed conservation efforts, yet one wonders how it will cope with climate change. Here is a flyer (hopper?) for a US frog poetry competition, because the problem isn’t confined to Australia. Click to enlarge. Here’s their web-site. I have no connection with this group, but it seems like a good way of encouraging people to think about conservation; I’m putting the poster up at my daughter’s school.
Following below is a poem about a wonderful night when I saw a road covered with frogs in a jumping carpet. It is biologically inaccurate, but I tried to capture the sense of wonder that came with what seemed like a million frogs. I wonder how long we will continue to see this type of natural phenomenon?
Frogs at Durras
We bought a house, feeble fibro shack,
walls thin as a yacht’s, teetering near the sea.
The second time we drove there, slowly,
tentatively, nosing towards ownership,
a rough jagged rain sawed through twilight.
We wondered if the house could survive.
Turning the corner, our eyes jumped,
jerked at a million tiny frogs revelling in rain,
the black streaming street a foaming river.
Each raindrop a watery egg, containing
tadpole, exploding into perfect frog
as it hit the tarmac, transmogrified.
I ran ahead of inching car, scooping throbbing fistfuls,
placing them on nature strip, dividing green from black.
And still they splashed and clung to sodden tar,
each splayed finger reading braille on the rough road;
indecipherable invitation to party, or to climb, perversely,
the dark warm curves of the sudden crushing car.
Three years later, we sit in heat, and await the frogs
never seen since the Walpurgis abandon, that abundant night.
Sometimes we have heard them, piping, tinkling, muted bells,
signalling to each other, chirruping reminders
as they wait beneath rocks, huddled in just damp dark
that all droughts must break. Our house still stands.
P.S.Cottier
Trail of disinformation
August 18, 2011
Must find accent key...
Trail of disinformation
P.S. Cottier
‘Does it really matter, love? After all, we’re talking about a snail, aren’t we? I put down bait for them. Or squash them. It’s them or my veggies.’ Bill smiled, ate a peanut, and drank a little more beer.
‘It’s a special snail. A green one. Tiny.’ I sounded vaguely desperate, and I knew it.
‘But it’s still a snail, green, orange or purple. Rainbow even. I just don’t see the point, worrying about an ugly little bugger like that.’
Bill had hit the nail, or the snail shell, on the head. We were just talking about ‘ugly little buggers’. We wanted to prevent the development of a proposed mine because of the presence of rare miniature green snails, only found in one small pocket of rain-forest. If it were koalas, once the subject of a bounty, we would have been national heroes. A rare species of bird would be understandable. Everyone can see beauty in a bird. But a mollusc is quite a different kettle of fish. Too far beneath our eyes to count. Too near our feet.
It was Jennifer, my best friend and fellow conservationist, who came up with the idea to give our campaign to save the habitat of the endangered snail a certain indefinable…je ne sais quoi.
I knew we were onto a winner the next time I ran into Bill at the pub. He was reading the newspaper, the one that Jennifer had just leaked her ‘secret information’ to. It trembled in his hands. I noticed that he wasn’t smiling, or cracking jokes like errant carapaces amongst the beans. Indeed, he seemed a little angry, a little red in the face.
Bill turned the paper over so I could read the article he had just read. I had to cover my nascent smile as I read:
‘French offer to take Aussie snails
This paper has heard that an offer has been made, through official channels, for all the endangered miniature green snails in the area currently being considered for the development of a new mine to be removed and relocated to France, at the expense of the French Government. It is hoped that the species may prove edible.’
‘Bloody cheek’, said Bill, as he took a long drink of beer. ‘They’ve got their own snails. Poor little buggers. Why do they want to steal ours?’
He’d forgotten his previous comments about pellets and gardening. We had wrapped the miniature green snail in the flag, rendered it as Australian as the kangaroo. We eat them, but that’s different, apparently.
Despite vigorous denials from the French embassy, the story stuck. The public was outraged. Next week, the Government officially declared the snail habitat protected.
And deep in the bush, the tiny snails act out their slimy lives, safe from the development of a new tin mine. And of course, safe from any forced repatriation to the restaurant rich and risky boulevards of Paris.
PS Cottier 