Meera Atkinson
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  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • News
  • Word
  • Fiction
    • Necropolis Drive
    • Up-skirt
    • Invisible moon
    • Désincarné / disembodied
  • Non-fiction
    • Friday essay: reclaiming artist-musician Anita Lane from the ‘despised’ label of muse
    • Guardian op-ed
    • Relatively sheltered
    • Read, listen, understand: why non-Indigenous Australians should read First Nations writing
    • The exiled child
  • Poetry
    • Precarious
    • Ant familias
    • Black-eared cuckoo
    • Dust storm
    • Writing a Dear John letter
    • Projection
    • Target
  • Contact
Picture

Black-eared cuckoo

Mournful in the mulga and mallee, long-noted
longing, then a skip of hot jazz through the Galilee
 
Terrestrial presence, not hiding, not seen
the woodland becomes its own language
 
olive-bronze, metallic sheen, cream buff-bellied,
eyes tiny coins of ebony, white brow and
the black stripe
 
coal, night
that steals the domed nest
 
a planetarium, deep space
beneath which all life stirs (feathered, beaked)
 
where a dark egg is laid in the heart
 
'Black-eared Cuckoo' was written for the ​Bimblebox 153 Birds Arts Project, a creative exploration of the bird species that inhabit the Bimblebox Nature Refuge, currently under threat from coal mining. This poem was later published in the ecopoetry journal Plumwood Mountain. ​
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