Night Flight

Night Flight

Tonight the air feels strange, not cold, in fact, not even cool

Unusually warm for Sydney in July, Australian Yule,

A perfect night for viewing stars, cloudless, clear and pure

Unspoilt by man’s pollution, no smoke haze to endure

And airport curfews now in place ensure a sky sublime

Pregnant silence coats the land like a Marcel Marceau mime.

Above the regal moon, so full, sits low in elevation,

Infuses mood, instils a sense of eerie expectation.

Peering from behind tall trees promoting shape and shadow

Furtive profiles on the land, lurking late night tableaux.

Such aura from the moonlight evokes weird scenes theatric

A world of two dimensions, a shadow-graph dramatic,

Immobile trees and buildings, flat silhouettes outlined

Robbed of girth and colour just in monochrome defined.

A breeding ground for creative minds, night under attack,

Lost souls and ghouls, a shaman, all shades of black on black,

Intensify the ambient mood as the nimbus rises higher

Flooding the earth with ghostly beams, nocturnal silver fire.

To all intents and purposes there is no night time breeze

Just a hint, a puff, a zephyr stirs high branches in the trees,

Quaintly moulds mixed mind shapes from hallucinogenic fronds

Fomenting fear and panic when a fertile brain responds

As one bold rustling mind shape, hanging high, takes flight

With powerful strokes of webbed skin into the dark of night

Its form quite imperceptible until its moon traverse

Revives foyer poster memories, a Transylvanian curse,

A horror movie cliché now transposed to local skies

Stark and black and potent uttering ultrasonic cries,

That pulse like radar signals across this heavenly stage

Directional technology born of a primitive age.

With strident shrieks this leader bat now signals its cohorts

In manner urgent drawing a shrill chorus of retorts

From shadowy shapes on branches, in querulous debates

Of fever pitch crescendo, which then suddenly abates,

Arrested on command as flapping leather flays the air

Their leader has directed an alternate night time lair

That generates a chilling, but unusual, local sight

A flurry of flying foxes taking off in mass night flight. 

 

 

 

As The Dust Settles

This one was based on an unsavory accident in 1997 when the ACT government demolished the old hospital on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra. Thousands lined the lakeside to watch but the explosives were incorrectly set and flying debris littered the lake, reached the far shore and killed one poor little girl. Sad, very sad.

As The Dust Settles

As the dust settles

media moths migrate 

en masse, 

attracted from the capitol, 

wild accusations 

like shrapnel fly, 

imploding the myth 

of Sunday by the shore, 

lake’s shores 

safe shores 

Lake Burley Grieving, 

ask whose is the shame, 

ask whose is the blame?

As the dust settles

back peddling 

politicians nit pick 

the community picnic, 

conceived of 

mass marketers 

now counting 

their electoral cost; 

old union heads, 

after the event, 

wax wise in lament 

of such cost effective, 

but non traditional 

solutions; oh yes, 

and dangerous too.

As the dust settles 

over the shattered 

sanatorium, 

once life’s savior 

now turned harbinger of death 

in its own deck of cards 

demolition demise, 

keen sighted 

legal eagles 

hover above the carrion 

that was Canberra’s child, 

but the dead 

will not arise 

from class actions, 

even on the third day.