Poetic Pause

Today is the third installment of SFB’s new feature, Poetic Pause. We hope you enjoy our excursion into the world of poetry.

Today’s poems come from regular contributor Victoria Norton.

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Melaleuca by Victoria Norton

Melaleuca, Melaleuca, Melaleuca

Rolls off my tongue and reverberates in my mind all day.

I give the word to you now …

 

Melaleuca, Melaleuca, Melaleuca.

Tall and full of blossom

Sweet honey scent in the air

 

I look up at the height and width

Centre stage before the creek edge.

Two cabbage moths kiss mid-air

 

In the special way lovers do

When they love each other very much

A once in a life time pleasure for the flutter-byes.

 

Snip snap! Two swallows have a morning tea

On the wing and diving

While the sky becomes dark

 

Again with a storm that won’t leave.

The Melaleuca rattles and shakes but

The adjoining trees stand

 

Still sentinels for this ANZAC day

One hundred years.

Rainbow lorikeets, six or more

 

Shake, rattle and roll

Sweetest nectar sipped

Dancing wings glimpsed.

A rainbow after the massive storm

A promise granted, fulfilled

Red, yellow, green wings

And a song of heavenly choirs.

 

Pied Cormorant by Victoria Norton

Hey, Pied Cormorant, you hang around in colonial colonnades

A shaggy mess of religious clothing being washed and dried

Roosting on old string lines, preening feathers void of water-proofing.

 

You gather those around you who have hooks on beak-ed heads

Which nod in bent throat unison as you congregate together

In estuaries, on unbalanced platforms of sticks in trees.

 

You are the preacher in black, with white shirt collar

When your flock takes flight you labour

In formation to gulp fish from the fresh or salty sea.

 

Then in configuration in the air, your bodies spell out

Your beloved Solomon’s references

In alpha numeric code – Chapter 2: Verse12.

 

It’s written in wing-ed cyphers in the sky

As you paddle through the air to declare:

‘The time of the singing birds is come!’