SHADED ECHOES
North-eastern Australia
In the great dark knowledge of the forest,
life runs subtly like a reminiscence.
The cassowary guarding his bright green eggs
is one expression of the incomprehensible
in a world of proud indifference,
pure inhuman otherness at the centre
of his own universe. Try following
his deep, booming calls through the stinging heat
to where there is no speech, no influencers,
just his jutting crest and gleaming throat:
bright electric wonder in the gloom.
FUTABA
(Balaeniceps rex)
Dinosaur bird in a Japanese zoo,
surrounded by the noises of creatures
she would never have heard in Uganda.
No dense trees or tropical weather here,
no meticulous records of life
and no fish in the water, though she waits.
She gathers materials for a nest
that will never be made; she has no husband,
no past, just this imprisoned present
and a grey and unreal future.
She claps her huge beak like a machine-gun
and shakes her head in greeting to the unknown.
ERASING THOTH
No more ibis left in Egypt,
except the mummified thousands
offered to the scribe god.
None in the wetlands north of Sydney;
the refugees gather in the city,
scavenging for our scraps.
Nature wrote a varied poem
that is gradually stripped away
to reveal the QR code of the future.
Published in Resurgence & Ecologist
S.C. Flynn 