Giles Watson's Blog - Posts Tagged "lyrebird"
Mass Extinction Poems
One of the things I am currently working on is a series of poems and pastels reflecting on the dire state of Australian biodiversity, and the threats to some of our most iconic species. I have recorded readings of some of them, which you can hear as you view the pastel, by following the YouTube links under each poem:
Bogong Moths and Pygmy Possums
(Poem by Giles Watson.)
We had the sunroom built when I was small,
overlooking the Brindabellas. I could make out
Mount Franklin, the long plateau of Gingera,
the huddled stone hulk of Mount Coree, and when
the sun went down and the lights came on,
bogong moths, fat as bullets, slapped themselves
against our windows, leaving smears
of dark brown wingscales - hundreds of them.
In the morning, they’d hang, torpid arrowheads,
closewinged under the eaves, their sooty robes
marked with darker sigils, long abdomens
plump with protein. I know now, but didn’t know
then, they were on their way to Queensland,
navigating by magnetic field: millions
upon millions of noctuids, ricocheting
off tree trunks, fibreglass sheds, window panes.
They slept in a cave on Gingera
‘til the stone was so thick with moths
they scaled it like shingles, wings
overlapping. Last year, scientists
went to look for them: there were only three.
And that’s why inside the pouches
of pygmy possums, the little ones
starve and shrivel at the teats, entombed
inside their mothers: because
drought killed all the moths,
carbon caused the drought, and humans
burnt the carbon, and sprayed
insecticide all along the flight-path.
When I was a kid, folks used to say
bogong moths were just about edible
if you were desperate: they were fatty,
so the first time you ate them, you threw up
from too much nutrition. Tribesfolk
rolled them into balls, stuck them
on twigs and toasted them. You couldn’t
make half a rissole of them now.
And when I shut my eyes to hear
rainfall against the window, still I think
of bogongs, though the sky is always empty,
and my nightmares are long lines of silent
starving honey possums staggering into dark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyuR...
Regent Honeyeater
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins from Canberra Birds and Wildlife. Birdsong recording by Marius Travell.)
The bird book I grew up with describes them
in flocks of hundreds, descending
on the Eucalypts in flower,
their voices bubbling like mountain-water
forming rivulets over quartz.
Older books called them warty-faced,
as though not noticing their plumes of ivory,
ebony and gold. They might have been called
the Spiderweb Bird, since they stitch
intricate nests of tree-bark together
with their silk, or Blossom Bird,
Lerp Bird, Bird of Charcoal and Sunlight,
but instead they called them Regents:
temporarily enthroned. By latest estimates
there are scarcely enough left to crown
a single flock, their forests felled,
their valleys flooded, their last singing-places
awash with babbling flames.
It's all hydroelectric and reservoirs,
glib governmental compromises,
concrete, chainsaws and crassness,
the songlines severed like limp serpents,
and every ephemeral beauty trampled.
Close, close the childhood book: we're through.
Its joys no longer joys, its truths no longer true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGQxD...
Corroboree Frogs
(Poem by Giles Watson, 13th January 2020)
I was twelve, and enraptured, deep in the Brindabellas,
jeans soaked to the knees in bogwaters.
Bulbous katydids trundled over moss,
their gumnut-brown elytra hiding fat abdomens
multicoloured as gobstoppers. Fallen eucalypts,
grey as sable, melted into squelching soil.
And there they were, where my father’s colleague
said they would be: slow-moving corroboree frogs
like impossibly precious living stones, obsidian veined
with sulphur, breathing jewels precipitated out of
wetness, scintillating in their highly polished skins.
Today the news came: their last remaining bastions
cannot yet be reached - the fires are still burning -
so we cannot know whether nature spared them
once again, or whether the bogland is boiled alive,
and I lie in bed suppressing tears, fearing
that while I slept, these little living encapsulations
of everything that’s sublime went out of the world
forever. And the child, aged twelve, for all his delight,
could not gauge the gravity of that moment:
that the tiny being who blessed his hand by crawling
across it could, in his lifetime, be for always gone.
Note: Although there are populations of healthy captive Corroboree Frogs kept in zoos, their numbers in the wild are dwindling beyond the point of no return as climate change dries up their habitats, chytrid fungus invades, and most recently, bushfires destroy their homes. The status of the Corroboree Frog as a wild species is threatened primarily by their having nowhere suitable to live. They are specialised animals, adapted for crawling (they do not jump) around in upland Sphagnum bogs. The recent bushfire catastrophe in eastern Australia destroyed some, but not all of their last remaining sites. The multicoloured insects mentioned in the poem are actually the Mountain Katydid, Acripeza reticulata. The poem narrates my own experience at a location in the Brindabella mountains south of Canberra, some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgNo-...
Superb Lyrebird
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins. Birdsong recording by Marc Anderson.)
Everything is diminishing, like a lyrebird
shimmering off into undergrowth, until
it is nothing but the dappledness of dry ferns
and fallen leaves, a quivering string
of Eucalyptus bark. The wet sclerophyll
turned fire-prone years ago; its tinder
crackles underfoot. Wood that once
was mossy lies sunbleached. The undergrowth
has died, and the next hillside is treeless.
The lyrebirds have nothing left to imitate
save chainsaws channering at the future,
depriving our country of moisture. This is when
it all goes up in flame: withered fronds,
shredded bark, leaves like parchment,
the lyrebird’s plumes, dancing into heaven,
common birds turned threatened
in a blinking. And all the armchair experts
have a theory: it was arson, it was fuel loads,
it was the Greens, or Mother Nature
being cruel – anything, anything but admitting
it was us who did this – that we are the knowing,
remorseless killers of lyrebirds, feral
as felines, stropping our claws with bank-statements,
stalking feathered innocence, causing loss, killing
with a fraction of the mercy of the fox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbj_M...
Bogong Moths and Pygmy Possums
(Poem by Giles Watson.)
We had the sunroom built when I was small,
overlooking the Brindabellas. I could make out
Mount Franklin, the long plateau of Gingera,
the huddled stone hulk of Mount Coree, and when
the sun went down and the lights came on,
bogong moths, fat as bullets, slapped themselves
against our windows, leaving smears
of dark brown wingscales - hundreds of them.
In the morning, they’d hang, torpid arrowheads,
closewinged under the eaves, their sooty robes
marked with darker sigils, long abdomens
plump with protein. I know now, but didn’t know
then, they were on their way to Queensland,
navigating by magnetic field: millions
upon millions of noctuids, ricocheting
off tree trunks, fibreglass sheds, window panes.
They slept in a cave on Gingera
‘til the stone was so thick with moths
they scaled it like shingles, wings
overlapping. Last year, scientists
went to look for them: there were only three.
And that’s why inside the pouches
of pygmy possums, the little ones
starve and shrivel at the teats, entombed
inside their mothers: because
drought killed all the moths,
carbon caused the drought, and humans
burnt the carbon, and sprayed
insecticide all along the flight-path.
When I was a kid, folks used to say
bogong moths were just about edible
if you were desperate: they were fatty,
so the first time you ate them, you threw up
from too much nutrition. Tribesfolk
rolled them into balls, stuck them
on twigs and toasted them. You couldn’t
make half a rissole of them now.
And when I shut my eyes to hear
rainfall against the window, still I think
of bogongs, though the sky is always empty,
and my nightmares are long lines of silent
starving honey possums staggering into dark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyuR...
Regent Honeyeater
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins from Canberra Birds and Wildlife. Birdsong recording by Marius Travell.)
The bird book I grew up with describes them
in flocks of hundreds, descending
on the Eucalypts in flower,
their voices bubbling like mountain-water
forming rivulets over quartz.
Older books called them warty-faced,
as though not noticing their plumes of ivory,
ebony and gold. They might have been called
the Spiderweb Bird, since they stitch
intricate nests of tree-bark together
with their silk, or Blossom Bird,
Lerp Bird, Bird of Charcoal and Sunlight,
but instead they called them Regents:
temporarily enthroned. By latest estimates
there are scarcely enough left to crown
a single flock, their forests felled,
their valleys flooded, their last singing-places
awash with babbling flames.
It's all hydroelectric and reservoirs,
glib governmental compromises,
concrete, chainsaws and crassness,
the songlines severed like limp serpents,
and every ephemeral beauty trampled.
Close, close the childhood book: we're through.
Its joys no longer joys, its truths no longer true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGQxD...
Corroboree Frogs
(Poem by Giles Watson, 13th January 2020)
I was twelve, and enraptured, deep in the Brindabellas,
jeans soaked to the knees in bogwaters.
Bulbous katydids trundled over moss,
their gumnut-brown elytra hiding fat abdomens
multicoloured as gobstoppers. Fallen eucalypts,
grey as sable, melted into squelching soil.
And there they were, where my father’s colleague
said they would be: slow-moving corroboree frogs
like impossibly precious living stones, obsidian veined
with sulphur, breathing jewels precipitated out of
wetness, scintillating in their highly polished skins.
Today the news came: their last remaining bastions
cannot yet be reached - the fires are still burning -
so we cannot know whether nature spared them
once again, or whether the bogland is boiled alive,
and I lie in bed suppressing tears, fearing
that while I slept, these little living encapsulations
of everything that’s sublime went out of the world
forever. And the child, aged twelve, for all his delight,
could not gauge the gravity of that moment:
that the tiny being who blessed his hand by crawling
across it could, in his lifetime, be for always gone.
Note: Although there are populations of healthy captive Corroboree Frogs kept in zoos, their numbers in the wild are dwindling beyond the point of no return as climate change dries up their habitats, chytrid fungus invades, and most recently, bushfires destroy their homes. The status of the Corroboree Frog as a wild species is threatened primarily by their having nowhere suitable to live. They are specialised animals, adapted for crawling (they do not jump) around in upland Sphagnum bogs. The recent bushfire catastrophe in eastern Australia destroyed some, but not all of their last remaining sites. The multicoloured insects mentioned in the poem are actually the Mountain Katydid, Acripeza reticulata. The poem narrates my own experience at a location in the Brindabella mountains south of Canberra, some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgNo-...
Superb Lyrebird
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins. Birdsong recording by Marc Anderson.)
Everything is diminishing, like a lyrebird
shimmering off into undergrowth, until
it is nothing but the dappledness of dry ferns
and fallen leaves, a quivering string
of Eucalyptus bark. The wet sclerophyll
turned fire-prone years ago; its tinder
crackles underfoot. Wood that once
was mossy lies sunbleached. The undergrowth
has died, and the next hillside is treeless.
The lyrebirds have nothing left to imitate
save chainsaws channering at the future,
depriving our country of moisture. This is when
it all goes up in flame: withered fronds,
shredded bark, leaves like parchment,
the lyrebird’s plumes, dancing into heaven,
common birds turned threatened
in a blinking. And all the armchair experts
have a theory: it was arson, it was fuel loads,
it was the Greens, or Mother Nature
being cruel – anything, anything but admitting
it was us who did this – that we are the knowing,
remorseless killers of lyrebirds, feral
as felines, stropping our claws with bank-statements,
stalking feathered innocence, causing loss, killing
with a fraction of the mercy of the fox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbj_M...
