Find Yourself a Nice Bird

A sound rings from the swamp, a clear clang bird call, slowly emerging from the tweet-clutter.

A boy bird searching for a spring love. Even my human-girl ears are piqued to this heart cry ringing true. All noise litter stops to hear the deep evolutionary song trickle through the air and thick vegetation,  a rythmic ponk ponk sent out with the pure mission to enrapture a mate, to seek for that one set of ears that cannot resist.

Then a hammer starts to bang, a plane flies above, all the creatures titter at once again. Rowdy rainbow lorikeets squawk like a football crowd, cheap chirps fling about in casual conversation about the weather, gossip, where to eat, where to go. The lover's throat is quiet.

Eucalyptus leaves rustle in a high breeze to shoosh the rabble. In the vacuum after a plane trail a space grows.  All the chat starts up again only to give way to the soloist who emerges above the din to pierce a  lovebird heart that beats in the swamp.

Space and Time

Lying under the flight-path, I like to listen to old, heavy planes rake across Sydney, this one at ten-thirty pm, half an hour before curfew. Some come later, in bad weather - you pity the pilot, egg him on to his landing strip via tantrummy clouds. The growl of engines taking their time across the sky, big and slow, travelling in an alternate universe it seems, time slowing down.  I think of them from my bed.  The old ones sound different, probably it's the props or the weight of them. Coming in from the desert or some map-dot of a place where things are run differently - places that don't have a curfew or runway lights. They must see Sydney from a hundred kilometres away, a huge hub of light, even at this late hour.  In that glow the Pope is here, somewhere, awake - are his rooms full of 'groupies', post-mass on this Sunday night?

Sydney mums sigh, everywhere, with both relief and sadness. School holidays finish soon, the last day of freedom tomorrow - we'll fork out some goodies for the last time and make sure the uniforms are clean, bananas & ham stockpiled for lunches. Baby siblings say goodbye once again to your playmates. Be ready to rise for the school bell everyone. The roads will clot once more with cars full of kids heading towards ABCs/123s.  Families return from all corners of Australia, from far-flung relatives, spare rooms, the snow or the farm, back home tonight by air or road. The rain falls for the first time this sunny, quiet week they were gone. We are always the ones to stay in town whilst others leave, left to enjoy the empty streets.

The sewage pipe is still broken, the real estate office is useless, all these holidays we've had our waste spilling onto the lower lawn and down into the earth-sponge and sadly, to the swamp I love.  Nobody cared, nobody came when we asked, all were off somewhere.

Me and my children, my husband occasionally wafting in from the world of men. What did we do apart from play imaginatively, roam in pyjamas, make snacks, watch DVD's and read laying in the sun, crawling all over each other?