PERTH AND FREMANTLE
When The Cockatoos Return To The Marri Trees
you have a song to sing and you stand among the marri trees and sing:
you stand under the sky on the tide of leaves, of gum nuts, bits of bark,
and sing what you need to sing, and you feel like a bloody fool, but so
what? who’s going to hear you? it’s a song you have to sing, it’s a hard
song to sing but it has to be sung, it asks, it begs, it will out, and in the
end you say ‘OK, let's sing,’ and you sing, for you cannot but sing, and
when you have done and you no longer cry to sing, the tree litter is
still there and the trees are still there and the sky is still there: the litter
is dried, and the trees claw at the blue, and the sky does not speak:
but the cockatoos will return in their season, they will return to the marri
trees, the black cockatoos will return in high summer for the creamy white
star-bursts of the bloodwoods, will swoop cackling, cawing, shadows of
the sky, to command, clutch the trees, beak at the sweetness of the flowers:
and later, in late winter, in spring, they will visit again, come back to the
marris, return for the soft new honkey nuts, to tear, pincer into the cores,
rip open the fruit of the trees to get to the kernels, chewing and crying out
as they chew as they sway high among the green, crying out with cries of
being, belonging, of owning and getting and spending, ancient chattering
of the heart: it might seem a long wait, and you might quit, or even forget,
and what you sing seems to make nothing happen and all you can see is
the dead tide and the trees and the sky and all you can do is to stand where
you are and to rest and to trust: and that might be, that will be; but the time
will come when the time will come, and they will return: suddenly one day
the black cockatoos will return to the marri trees, they will return to ride the
marri trees in riot of appetite, crying out what is of the heart, is of the blood