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!’