| ONE WEEK DAY WHILE WALKING By Jeremy Gadd One week day while walking down Wattle Street, I heard a cry that brought me to a halt in mid-stride like a prisoner shackled to a wall, and my heart missed a beat, as if I’d died. It wasn’t an infant in distress, someone being beaten or a woman wailing but over the growl and heavy hum of traffic I had heard the keening cry of a corella, that small white parrot with blue-ringed eye that is prolific in the outback interior and the equatorial north of the country, and was transported to another time, to another place, in a previous life, before, by necessity, being bound to an office desk dealing with the inconsequential, coping with the grind of a daily diurnal commute, abiding by train time-tables simply to keep body and soul together. Happier, more languid days had once been spent watching the antics of crowds of corellas as they argued, mated, defecated; their antics as amusing as circus clowns as they raucously shredded native fig trees beside billabongs on tropical Top End wetlands. And I saw again the corella covered trees and their feathers falling like white confetti, the flocks turning like indolent galaxies as they moved from tree to tree; saw again the dignified gait of a goanna before it scuttled between buffalo wallows; saw the snouts of semi-submerged crocodiles patiently waiting for prey to swallow; felt a file snake’s rough skin squirm beneath bare feet as it wormed in the mud among pandanus palm roots and, looking up through low-slung wires towards the high-rise city towers occupied by corporate suits pecking at keyboards like battery hens, I saw two birds, lost and crying, in a tree, suffocating from noxious fumes. And as memories of that past Elysian period re-surfaced in my mind, as if dragged like salvage from subconscious depths, bringing a beatific smile to my face and eliciting tears from my eyes, I remembered a moment that had been and sights that would never again be seen – by me. And as I watched the corellas wheel and fly, two pieces of purity against tainted sky, I knew that which has been experienced can never be taken away; that which is known is with us to our dying day. |
About the Author: Over 220 of Jeremy Gadd’s poems have appeared in newspapers, periodicals and literary magazines in Australia, the USA, UK, New Zealand, Germany and India and he published four volumes of poetry: Reflections While Flying on Empty, published by Aldrich Press, USA, 2015; Selected Poems, one hundred previously published poems (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2013); Twenty Six Poems, a chapbook published by the AICD (Sydney) in 2000 and A Tale of Tai Ringal and Other Poems, a livre d’artiste with engravings by P. John Burden, published by the Bournehall Press, England (now found in rare book collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Samuel Paley Library, Temple University Library, Philadelphia, and the Reid Library in Western Australia). |