Sometimes a life provides a rare moment of confluence, where art inspires poetry, poetry inspires art.
I paint my words, my love of birds – and a poet replied. Thank you for adding me to your poetry conversation, RA.
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Michael Dransfield in Tasmania
by Robert Adamson
A lagoon reflects low sky:
clouds seen are clouds
as seen — words open
their shells in his brain.
We study a drawing
of Emma’s night parrot.
Imagination shifts,
fails us on the slope.
Campfire flares to feathers,
a parrot-green light
for the rescue party.
He patched up words
and paper in a loft, here
extinction’s ornithologists
thrive on the poorly
written histories.
The embers are scales
covering the legs,
feet adapted for ground
with slightly upturned
claws. Just after dawn
he swings a metaphor
to make the tea. The tent’s
gone stiff with frost,
on the floor his maps
await a torturer’s nib:
ink’s dark, although
not suite indelible, lines
begin to unravel.
Clocks and theories
slash leaves, clip wings
in remnant wilderness.
At Rushy Lagoon, birds
bow and call the light—
James McAuley wrote
sharp lyrics here. He walked
around the shore,
chanting: “the broken
trust, the litter and the stink.”
Mount Ossa’s dolerite
candlesticks can’t flicker
on a coast that’s never clear.
© 2015 Robert Adamson, from ‘Net Needle: Poems by Robert Adamson.’ Re-published on this blog with permission from the Author.
emma lindsay 