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Shearwaters

uploaded: Thu, Jul 10, 2014 @ 8:56 PM

by	robwalkerpoet
length	1:00
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Shearwaters
Ocean Beach, Strachan, Tasmania

Earth turns slowly from its pinking sun;
horizon clouds of black are rolling, forming.
Arcing in, the birds, in circles swarming
unerring compasses. The graceful wheel is spun.

Like chaff that’s blown from husk
they swarm in eddies, pixellate the scene,
electrons orbiting about their nuclei unseen.
Then fall exhausted, tumble from the dusk.

Arking in, as gargling galahs,
before their fetid burrows nightly land
homing on magnetic fields and stars
to tussocked dunes which sift a windblown sand.

Birds and galaxies. Revolving light.
Swirling in the supernova night.

(In Tasmania, southern Australia, Shearwaters were known as mutton birds, an early food source for both indigenous and early colonisers.)

Shearwaters was originally published in a poetry booklet accompanying Zephyr Quartet’s CD A Rain from The Shadows
CD Catalogue No.: 9319505830410. It’s one of very few that I’ve written in a traditional (sonnet) form.