My land of birth is like a continent,

its vast heart eaten down to parchment

by uncomprehending winds

until a palimpsest remains

of once-abundant waterways,

immense plains cicatriced by ridges

marking dinosaur terrain:

a metaphor of primal mind,

where language confronts silences

so profound that breathing

serves as utterance.

My land of birth is like an island

circled by the dolphins’ dreaming,

older than religion, with a wisdom

unexplained, where days blaze

with the stupefying brilliance

of asteroids, and nights spin nests

of stultifying darkness under nets of stars.

Islanders experience resistance

to the world beyond, a tension between

greetings and goodbyes, whose specific

gravity remains in equilibrium, despite

the glint of sadness in the island-dwellers’ eyes.

                                  A Cetacean Odyssey

                              Like singing ships they pass,

                         composing sagas of their journeys,

                             charting subaquatic paths

                               for others not yet born—

Present at the birth of whales are midwives of the deep,

who thrust the newborn up to where the lungs meet air in quantum leap.

Forged from the Icelandic tongue, “hvalr” becomes English “whale”,

pursued for oil and ambergris in barbarous days of steam and sail.

The moon that governs water, the element of mystery,

is sacred to cetaceans and dictates their history.

Skin that withers in the sun is offered to the moon,

whose image in callosities recalls a Nordic rune.

It is for the silver-faced Selene that the humpbacks sing:

protector of pelagic nomads in their voyaging.

It is the moon that shepherds whales through sea-lanes fraught with hidden threat,

where bones of ancestors recount how ambush dealt a brutal death.

When calves are born their mothers transmute blood to warm galactic streams;

their love unlocks the universe, where moon meets whales in cosmic dreams.

From argonauts to cosmonauts, from fabled Colchis to Selene,

whale migrations re-enact the archetypal epic journey.

The young inherit timeless lore as sagas, ocean lullabies,

to guide them on their odyssey in quest of paradise.

Eastern Sydney’s sandstone cliffs

Each atom is an essay in resistances:

sandstone that was sediment millennia ago

writhing into patterns of the tides

along this eastern shelf,

cicatrice inured to brine’s abrasiveness.

There is a titanic end-game

being played out on these cliffs:

surf’s persistence versus face-off,

obduracy meets duress with edgy

attitudes to stress,

matter grudgingly withheld,

ceding substance by the gram;

crashing, vanquished, to their knees,

doomed by sea-conspiracies.

The cliffs evoke Promethean tenacity’s

heroic stance, making light of aeons,

geology’s long golden trance

whose soft and hard grains petrify

in sculpted shells and overhangs,

stratifying gleaming quartz

compressed by sibilance of sand,

burnished by the sun and wind and agile

water artisans to mythopoeic shoreline

as a fitting end to land.

My arrival coincides with that of butterflies,

detecting subtle signals in the ether

that denote their vine. Pliant loops

and tropes and tendrils interlacing trellises

lure them back to these life-giving colonies.

This is the nursery and the lullaby, gently undulating

beneath massive trees. The caterpillars hatch and feed,

outgrow their skins, wax plump and sleek, entering

their dormant phase within a lime-green time-capsule,

the chrysalis where they transmogrify.

Emerging with damp, crumpled wings whose veins

are pumped with haemolymph, they wait

until the jewel colours dry, when they will

assay the sky that arcs towards infinity,

glimpsed through eyelike apertures in canopies.

Inspired by a Landcare initiative, Tamborine Mountain.

Male catbirds don’t build bowers,

but they do bring offerings

of flowers, to romance a female

they desire as spouse. They like to dance.

Catbirds pair for life. Hens build

a spacious nest with twigs and vines,

cushioned with soft, rotted wood

overlaid with moss or leaves.

Nests are camouflaged aloft

in giant stinging trees, or in the crowns

of tree ferns, like the nests

of regent birds, their friends.

Male catbirds, constant in their ways,

feed the chosen hen year round.

She waits for his arrival

bearing juicy gifts of fruit—

a native fig for preference

or sometimes an exotic treat:

a garnet grape she’ll savour

for its nectar-scented flesh.

They’ll dive and dip on days of heat

mirage, a double emerald flash,

bathing in the limpid water

cupped in joints of giant trees.

They take turns tending nestlings

when they hatch, and he does not neglect

assiduous patrols of territory

to safeguard boundaries.

Catbird, you are in my world:

it gladdens me to realise that—

but is there room for me

in your diminished habitat? 

Air, thinned by the mountain,

autumn, night, insinuates itself

through cold-lipped partings in

the louvre-glass. The fridge purrs

like an animal, its belly full,

while outside in the stippled forest,

dense beyond the dappled yard,

an owl’s cry fills the hollows

that a waxing moon left dark.