New Poetry by Greg McLaren

The return

Some of the birds have come back –

banded stilts, the eastern curlews,

godwits, whimbrels –

                                     back to the sun-

whitened sands,

                          the thin urinous creekwater

and half-lived muds and silts,

back from the wet-glossy Arctic,

the long, now-sudden thaw the high-numbered north’s become.

Our low summer sucks at the thin orange bands

your barely-fleshed legs are.

                                             Culverts and greasy canals

drain out into the sudden local creeks

the low system drops in from off the coast.

Where are the dark, wide straps of wormy feed

from under memorised sand to fat you up,

meat on the breast to send you

                                                  between homes again.

This brown channel pelts by, washing

the thin fuzz familiar birds grace –

                                                       cormorants,

snakebirds, herons –

                                   near where the Styx

meets deeper water, where there’s nothing

to sate the longer circlers,

those off-shored shorebirds,

                                             the warehoused pilgrims.

The world’s entire history sets out each encoded fate.

The sun’s ticking is fairly constant.

                                                       Muggy night.

The first plovers in a long while

hang out a stuttered and drifting call.

- © Greg Mclaren 2022

Greg McLaren is a poet, teacher and reformed critic who lives in the lower Blue Mountains. His books include After Han Shan (Flying Islands), The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead, Australian ravens and Windfall (Puncher & Wattmann).