Still noon in uncharted spring
where an idle hilding breeze can hardly stir
one dark pine-needle from its silent groove,
sufficiency to oil perpetual motion
of rippling white-gum leaves, bleached and dangling.
Tiniest black ants explore
black words in columns -
antithesis of white glare,
Yeats in perpetuity,
whoever prints, or on whatever
table of the wide world's brunch
in minds they find themselves
to sing of 'long Saturnian sleep' -
minute black legs have run over 'hooves'
that 'stamped at the black margin of the wood',
a moment between rosella calls and
the querulous kazoos / slide-whistle
inquiries of magpies*;
when the raucous cockatoos have torn
their jagged vortices, and been answered
in the wreckage of their 'horrible' utterance,
past yellow fields in drought, where dark kine
stand stark,
from wind-break pines,
I fancy, all the blue-gummed-haze away
off to the far line,
signifying Strzelecki ranges.
....................
Quotes from 'On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac' - W.B Yeats
*the Australian magpie, unlike the Eurasian Magpie, is not of the crow family - and does not eat young birds.
