Thirteen ways of dreaming the Glossy Black Cockatoo

for Taron,
i.m. of Philip Tiver

1.
Among a thousand charred casuarinas, honey myrtles and sugar gums
the only thing desired
was the eye of the glossy black cockatoo
 
2.
Look, the Milky Way is a bark canoe. Ngurunderi and his drowned wives
are like three glossies, circling,
finding shelter in a ghost gum, in the bone-dry forest
 
3.
A black cockatoo appears like Batman in smoke plumes
in pyrocumulus, through the burning gullies, drifting as far as the Tasman Sea
 
4.
The land, the sea and a woman
                                 are one
The land, the sea, a woman and a glossy black cockatoo
cawing through the valley at dusk,
                                                  are one
5.
What’s better, what’s worse? Laydies, gentlethems
A precarious shape-shifting canopy, the virtual feathers of a glossy
who cannot be ghosted, who cannot hide from
WiFi, or drones, or videography? That rare sight
 
 6.
Ngurunderi, like the splinter in my finger I feel their spirit
Stories lodge in my throat. The waves creep, wind whispers,
the glossy bird clicks their tongue, loosening the casuarina cones
 
 7.
The air was acrid, a blue flame licked our feet
Grey ash covered the burnt spines of grass trees
a mood of despair then up, up high—a sorority of glossies,
wings sauté, banded flames in the she-oaks
 
8.
Walk the mudflats, banksias and silver wattle pines
Catechized by galahs, distracted by chattering magpies
Hear the noisy screech of the yellow-tailed bird
Imagine, the glossy cockatoo’s ethereal song
 
 9.
Ngurunderi said this is a place of death, of Murray River
dreaming. I know death, its prize: an ebony feather, scarlet-tipped, framed
And I know what it feels like to walk through death, gingerly
back to the living
 
10.
Ngurunderi said this island is a place of death. Of boat builders,
of free settlers, American sealers who abducted Hannah, Mary, Sal
Truganini’s tribal sisters, Lowhenunhe and Maggerleede taken
sold as slaves; Murrerninghe was shot by Robert Gamble
Suke, Betty, Wab of the gully, women who fished, trapping wallaby
refusing rations, speaking their own language, in wurleys
Tortured, tied, their ears cropped, yet clearing the earth, gently,
with grass-reed fire. Through descendants their stories are
part of the land like the shape of the glossy black cockatoos
appearing when sunset’s amber wound stains the blue gums
 
11.
A koala growling in the stringy bark kept us awake.
Dawn birds, trumpet cried across the valley
Rain on the road, the glossy black cockatoo
passes overhead; sleek, swift, like a bullet
 
12.
Ribbed light, the men are harvesting oysters, a seal on its side, unfolding
The silhouette of a black cockatoo, wings akimbo
 
13.
Driving through Second Valley, hurtling home in one direction
the fields resplendent, sunlit, bordered by tall pines,
wayilayn, your slow, graceful wing beats— stay

Archive

• wayilayn is a Gundalung word for ‘glossy black cockatoo
• Elder, Bruce. Blood on the wattle: Massacres and maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788. Sydney: New Holland, 2003.
• Cawthorne, William Anderson. The Kangaroo Islanders: A Story of South Australia before Colonization, 1823. Rigby, 1926.

"As a poet, my process embodies scrutiny over invasion" – Reflection – Michelle Cahill