We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 116
AUTUMN 2009
POETRY
Of Small Birds
I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
Emily Dickinson
These are not the flying dinosaurs
that sculpt the skies with raptor power
decking shields, coins, architraves
nor the dark corvids sly as humans
that place nuts on tramlines or zebra crossings
for safe and automatic cracking
split small birds’ heads at the bat of a wing
croak abysmally throughout the deserts
of suburbia, the killing fields of abattoirs
squat on Odin’s regal shoulders
squawking their self-important dualities
of memory and prophecy.
These are the smaller mysteries
nesting on your palm light as breath
a red-browed firetail, fawn-fallow feathers
smooth-fluffed into grey striations subtly
shading each into each this miracle
thought in the mind of God
its clouding eye now leaking life that crossed
that passing car on Birchwood Drive.
Or the two hopping fairy blue wrens
on your morning patio alternating
the currents of their hardwired twitch
and bounce between watchful tree
and sandstock bricks seething
with edible minutiae invisible
to your median eye. As the female pecks
the male amps up his alpha
in scales of butterfly blue.
These love the low prickly shelter
of miner- and corvid-free rosemary
blackberry, grevillea, wild roses,
so just add a bowl of fresh water
mulch the cat and presto
you’ve got them for free
along with the odd attendant flycatcher
hoovering up the bugs the wrens have raised.
Thornbills and white-eyes
like it higher up: their electronic twitters
flock the canopies they fine-comb for eucalypt lice
while the eastern spinebill zooms down
to leave you breathless with the rarity
of its visits, the jewelled head
and infinite arc of that tiny beak
sucking sweetness from the sage
its red tubular bells
bent silent
in the sun.
PETER LACH-NEWINSKY is co-author of Working with Poetry (Kamp Verlag 1986). He won second prizes in the 2008 Shoalhaven Literary Award and 2008 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition. He and his wife work a 20-acre permaculture farm in Bundanoon in the southern highlands of NSW.
The Man from Sudan in the Dried Flower Store at Victoria Market
her voice hung like an icicle
a walrus’ tusk frozen
on the sneer’s corner
‘we’re closed’ she said
and those blue eyes
with the tiniest of dark centres
did not blink oncein this room of buckets
wicker chairs
brittle statice
and sepia roses
preserved head down
the (other) customers stared
nobody said a word
he’d felt the cold draught
on entering
before the voice even
and soon after
his own darkness
pushing up through the pallor
like a stalagmite
GRACE YEE is a PhD candidate at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. She also teaches English as a Second Language.
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