Category Archives: Nature Poetry

Archetypal Swamp Hen

I watch as the swamphen walks his recently dried-out lake shoreline border. He is the most obvious bird that’s left. A black-blue purple, with red beak, hen sized, singing up the will-filled depths, tail flicking as he walks the shoreline with large splayed-toed unwebbed feet, the now-cracked bed littered with its prints. I watch him at the borders of the grass and faintest high-water line, still wet, most recent; the whole thing shrinking. It looks like his domain. A guardian of a kind of threshold. One of the few, maybe the only watery bird, who stays. 

But then in the clump of maleleucas, on which used to be a kind of island, I see a small flitting and a rushing, as one bird chases another, just a couple of shadows, then disappearing behind another clump. Then out they shoot again, and I see they’re crakes, probably spotted, but they’re so far away. Like a smaller version of the swaphen—a smaller version in and out of branches and shrubby trees. A smaller version of the bird who stays. And I’m reminded too of the buff-banded rail. All belly striped and buff/orange colourings, slightly bigger than the crake, but stopping short of the swaphen. Another shoreline bird who stays, but masked and masking within the reeds and rushes and the shade. The rail another kind of version of this archetypal shoreline birding. The moorhens and the coots step into the water more often than not, swimming; and leave with the water. Not the swamphen, and now I’m wondering maybe too the crake and rail. But what they each seem to announce is an archetypal shoreline lakeside bird. A bird that gives these three forms for this place, but given different places, different plants and lakes and waters, generally a different context, would produce different birds. Like the native black tailed hen. Like a million other other-place variations. 

Like Goethe’s archetypal plant with an infinite amount of potential manifestations, so too the lakeside threshold bird. The lakeside threshold hen.

The Drying of the Lake

I’ve been spending some time at the lake these last days and weeks, feeling like a kind of (death) doula as it dries out. This is the first time it’s dried in three years, after a couple of wet winters. The water recedes, the soft mud dries under the sun and then begins to crack. Footprints left by swamp hens, turtles, foxes, humans go from soft to baked in as they shift from wetter spots to more dry, disappearing as they walk to ground that’s higher/dryer. Most of the stalks retreat to deeper waters, the dotterels and sandpipers move on. Until almost all the birds are left in the final southern-ended deeper-water pond. A handful of swans, some pacific black ducks, stilts, dotterels, coots and moorhens, one spoonbill, a couple of wood-ducks and pink ears, a buff-banded rail or two, a few spotted crakes and some warblers in the reeds. But this is a low they haven’t seen in years. Each day it shrinks a little further, higher land exposed, the water creeping in from the edges, tracks left underneath and then in its wake. Ducks stick to the morning shade when available, the crows or wagtails descend down to the edges, the corellas land on logs amongst ducks for drinks. A sudden shower might boost the coffers for some days, a week maybe, but the overall trend leads towards drying out, leads inevitably towards death—when I know it’ll mostly only be the swamp hens that are left. 

I’ve seen it dry, I’ve seen it fill. I’ve seen it hover in between. But this day it makes me reflect on larger drying outs, larger shutting downs, larger deaths. Makes me think of things past middle age. Makes me think of plants that whither, and end-of-day sunsets. Makes me think of our world today, knowing that we may get a chance showering of rain, or see things more life-filled and younger for a day. But that the overall trend now is one just past middle age, tending as it must towards death. Which is not to say that things are too late, or that things must be given up. Any more than it is correct to lament the setting of the sun, the shift into older age, the drying of the lake. All things come with time, and bring their next-step gifts. The seasons come and go, and we find ourselves within them. So yes, there are cycles, but there is direction too. The seasons are but part of the larger seasons of the earth. Of the earth, of sun and stars and moon. There are rhythms and patterns, things follow a breathing, but a forward momentum too. The rain will return to this lake, the sun will rise again tomorrow, the plant will die and new seeds will grow anew. But it is not some endlessly recurring loop. Something larger is at play. Something longer at work. The overall trend of the earth is one, we must say, that has shifted past its middle age. 

And so we must ask ourselves what we find in the closing of the day, in the withering of the plant, in the older years of age; in the rising of the moon, in the waters that recede and mud that cracks. We find nothing but a receding of the physical life, but also a kind of liberation. As the forces of life wane, so the death forces are released. Liberated. Not in a destructive way, but in a potentially fruitful way. The night is liberated. Given freedom. Given free reign. What do we find in darkness? What do we find in death? We find somethign that lives on, immaterial, unphsyical though it may be. Consciousness. Who we are continues between falling asleep and waking up from rest. Otherwise we wouldn’t know who or where we were each and every morning. Something of us continues, even, beyond the reach of the moment of death. 

And so the lake continues. And so the day continues. And so the plant continues. And so our sleeping and dying selves continue. Not to the same beginnings, but to the next step on our evolving paths. So the earth continues. So society continues. To its next beginnings. To its next stepping offs. 

How to work, though, with that which stretches across? That which works and weaves throughout the night. That which works and weaves beyond death, beyond Thomas’ “dying of the light.” I dare not rage against, but find the new light within the darkness, an inverted inner light, and build with that the next steps. Lakes. Plants. Days. Lives. Societies. Planets. 

And so it is a choice we face. Going down with the dying day and plant and life. Or going with this, going through, through and with the night, through and with the death. Finding somethign there to build up with; to consciously build the next.

Kwillena and Kwulla

It’s only when we see small fish like whitebait or even blowfish by the river’s edge that we notice most of the time there are no fish there; they’ve come up out of deeper water. It’s only when we see bigger fish like mullet chasing white bait that we realise most of the time they’re in deeper water chasing smaller fish usually there. And it’s only when we see the largest water animals like dolphins that we realise we are seeing here something of the very depths now rising, chasing fish from slightly higher waters, who were maybe chasing fish from slightly higher waters still, until they’re all present at the shoreline edge. The whole gradation of the depths expressed. 

Elsewhere we might see even finer shifts, like the workings of sealions, sharks and whales. Different-sized whitebait. Other fish of varying ranges. Those that swim the surface, mid range, depths. Those that cross those lines. Everything has a lawful place. Everythign fits. Smaller shoreline crabs, for instance, we half expect, but what a suprise when we see a larger one emerging from the shadowed depths as we go walking by.

And so it was this day, looking down where usually its sand or some blowfish floating on the tide, and see instead the form of the will-filled, life-filled darkened depths given form and speed and strength in dolphin chasing the mullet pinned against the limestone wallings—the fish one form, schooling, though broken into bits when the dolphin strikes and hits. The mullet, out of his depths, pressed, by the upsurging will of life, against death.

Wave-Cloud Mirror

Strato-cumulus summer morning, wind from the south west, close to zero swell, mid-sky moon neither north nor south, small shoreline waves smacking onto the sand where they throw airy bubbles in white foam first ashore, then also back out to sea, the bubbles spreading gradually larger until they’re somewhat cloud-like along the shoreline line. Eventually though the airy bubbles disperse, the whiteness dissolves into the shallow water clear and green, just before another wave throws itself ashore and the whole scene is again repeated. And in these moments of water meeting earth we see the way that air erupts between their meeting, and then is carried on the surface of the water for a moment, before the air once again leaves, no longer contained in tiny bubbled skin, but free to disperse (until, of course, it’s trapped again by another wave, making airy caverns, caves, as it falls again to earth). The water then carries the air on the ocean shoreline. While above, in all the strato-cumulus light-grey cloudy blanketing, the air…it carries water. Air in water. Water in air. 

Then often, as the day warms, clouds disperse, much the same as the air disperses between waves.

Waves the Water’s Made

Another strato-cumulus rumpled underbelly of grey cloud blanket, with wind from southwest; a cooler morning though still summer warm. The high tide line barely makes it over the frontline shoreline wall to the south end of the beachy bay. A smoothed cliff formation ridge which the advancing water has formed and run over to a higher tide line above, then formed again on the way out. The moon has been mid-sky these last days, neither peak north nor south, the tides sometimes two high or low in a day, pulled neither way out nor way up, while the water has been helped ashore by the onshore wind. Further north, towards middle bay the more straighline wall and cliff line of the south gives way to a rhythmic interplay of rising and then falling rhytmic ridges, the whole shoreline breathing here, the high tide line just up and over the peak of each little ridge, where slightly to the north west side of each brief rounded cliff lips appear again similar to the long line further south, where water has run up and over the ridge lip but here has also run along it and carved out a slight wave formation. The watery horizontal waves of the ocean forming, after they crash, the same in the sand. And we see here how all such rock formations are made by such a flowing, by such a snaking, including Kaarta-Kitj Wave Rock further inland.

Human in the Bay 

There is a human being who lays himself down at the shoreline each day. His head lies to the south in the more wall-like form of the shoreline sand, the water held back there from its prevailing direction (a large granite groyne to the south we should probably mention). His head is up this end, all hard form and walls, like the bony borders of the head. He then moves further down as we walk north, towards the middle of the bay as it curves in, finding there a gradual easing and rhythmic breaking of the sand and water of the bay, as little ridges appear, pointing the way to the prevailing wave and wind and tide, each a little replica in miniture of the overall bay outside. Here we find a gradual procession to a kind of ribbing and breathing of the man in the up-and-down, in-and-out, movements of the shoreline sand, little bays within the overall bay, a tiny mirroring. Eventually, moving further north as the middle of the bay begins to curve back out again, we find the place where the often-dominant wind and wave direction rolls up ashore, and there we find no wall, nor rounded ridges of little rhythmic bays, but usually flat open sands with water sliding in on the shoreline walking way. Here the man’s limbs reach out and on, gradually stretching, bones thinning out to nothing, everything.

Human in the Bay—Another Way

A small sand-cliff line running the length of much of the bay today; from the southern part anyway. Same man lying down along the shoreline way. Head up the long cliff-line end, where the low, mid-sky moon barely makes it over the sandy clifftop, less waves, until we reach mid bay, where the slightly larger wave, where the shoreline turns, makes it up and over the sandyclifftop, rounding and flattening it, so we have little rhytmic ridges left, where the cliffline would otherwise have stayed; this ribbing section the middle of the man, carrying on until the ribs are flattened and the water moves freely one way and another as the bay curves back around to face the approaching waves. Here his limbs and belly are open to the world—his willing really, following the feeling of ribcage midbay, and the thinking of the hedy clifftop. The old man again there this day, but displaying himslef in slightly different ways—one of an infinite number of ways.

Ocean-Sky Mirror 

The ocean-sky mirror is clear today. The ruffled underbelly of strato-cumulus winging in from the west with cooler wind in their sales, grey and rippled. The ocean surface overbelly below, from shoreline green through to a slowly-deepened blue, an equally-ruppled and riffled rushing and falling of little mounds and troughs, never still, changing though your eyes my settle on place. The rounded churning is not enough for a wave to break except where they fall to earth and rise to air at shoreline arrivals. Same as the clouds are not enough to break into rain, or the wind strong enough to fold over any temporary summits into foam when they rise. The ocean sky mirror is clear today, mild in its middling, the shoreline organism living, breathing, lawful.