The birds live a parallel existence to us in this place.
Their comings and goings.
Chords and clusters.
Three pelicans flying past the Moriac Store.
A skein of ibis over the nutbrown paddocks.
The nimble swallows tousling the dunes.
Fourteen swans arrive to glide the inlet for three days in the midweek.
By Saturday they’re gone to a place no google-earther knows,
some soak of metaphysical reeds beyond coordinates.
A brown wren bounces on the tongue of cliff
triggering the voice in my head. The cadence rises,
a glowing white gannet in the Picasso-blue of late afternoon.
The night to come has got into the colour of the sea,
some of the earth too, the way soil seeds the clouds.
Time is music then, the wren has found its pair
to dinner-dance amid the ocean sound.
Above what precise patch of moonah-loam will they sleep tonight?
In what proximity to the bristlebird?
It behooves us not to know
we haven’t made it impossible for them just yet.
So yes, let’s say that’s joy they’re tweeting in the evening light
the indispensable song of right-place-right-time
our language might call Life. They do compute and metaphor
but too quick to scribble down or Excel.
Life for all then, private, an untrackable symphony,
no notation of wood or wind, no emulsion even
but what’s stored in the battery of the heath, in the sea-bed.
Now the swell is coming on, gesturing towards the cliffs
before surging through the guzzle-clefts. As night descends
the place is light, made of light — ask the planets watching on
where every dawn’s an anniversary
ask the birds but just for fun
content in the knowledge you may never get an answer.
Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria, Australia. He lives on Wadawurrung country. Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has also twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His poetry collection, Southsightedness, was published in April 2025 by Transit Lounge.
