Homings and Departures poem 1 Sept Written By Todd Turner Fieldwork The hilltop backs onto a concrete hedge,urban towers that are sheltered by a stand of trees: native gums, strewn figs and a pair of hoop pines, older than the root-broken tar-gravel path below.As much an enclosure as an open field,this slope is home to the red-blue winged swallow, the white moth, the lapwing and the crow. Home to earth-digging corellas, the pestilent myna and its pesky herd. And one day to a magpie who,bedraggled, lay face down on the path. I first thought it a crow until, angling it up with my boot, I saw her grey upper tail, her white rump and ashy underwing.A gassy stench rose from under herand field ants moved in and out of her beak. With two thickish twigs, I stretchered her over to the foot of a pine, buried her with matted conifer brush, debris and leaves. I left her there to the hide beetles and the flesh-boring burying beetles, who would come to grapple through seed-cone, stick and leaf, mud, and at last, by way of orifice, would sheath her, nosh on herripe tissue and fleshy muck, before leaving eggs in a crypt scraped under her remains. Larvae would move into beetledom, into the birthwing of the hutted carcass, and there draw on the phlegmy gush of blood and bone.Later, when I saw that the wind had threshedthe burial to a thatch of knotted sticks,I eagerly peered into an opening, rummaged through empty afterwork to find clumped feathers and a wing, partially intact. Digging further, I hit upon a skull, then another. The first, that of a petite bird,a swallow perhaps – its vertebrae like the cast mould of an unset jewel. The second was clearly that of the magpie.I stepped back and stood staring into the hollowed-out eyes, the gone brain,spiralling and turning it upside down, prying the underside with my eye, thumbing and spinning it into a circle, thinking,and even speaking: I know what the cycle serves, but what is being served by the cycle? It’s arguable, I know – best to just walk and fall in love with the field, the beloved range of the ubiquitous grass. Grace There was something in the rain, in the way it fell.Something in the way of the birds. And in the way of the river. Something in the way it fell.Something about how the river rose, and about the stillness of the birds on the banks in the rainand about the way the air made it feel possible to forgive –and be forgiven. Todd Turner
Homings and Departures poem 1 Sept Written By Todd Turner Fieldwork The hilltop backs onto a concrete hedge,urban towers that are sheltered by a stand of trees: native gums, strewn figs and a pair of hoop pines, older than the root-broken tar-gravel path below.As much an enclosure as an open field,this slope is home to the red-blue winged swallow, the white moth, the lapwing and the crow. Home to earth-digging corellas, the pestilent myna and its pesky herd. And one day to a magpie who,bedraggled, lay face down on the path. I first thought it a crow until, angling it up with my boot, I saw her grey upper tail, her white rump and ashy underwing.A gassy stench rose from under herand field ants moved in and out of her beak. With two thickish twigs, I stretchered her over to the foot of a pine, buried her with matted conifer brush, debris and leaves. I left her there to the hide beetles and the flesh-boring burying beetles, who would come to grapple through seed-cone, stick and leaf, mud, and at last, by way of orifice, would sheath her, nosh on herripe tissue and fleshy muck, before leaving eggs in a crypt scraped under her remains. Larvae would move into beetledom, into the birthwing of the hutted carcass, and there draw on the phlegmy gush of blood and bone.Later, when I saw that the wind had threshedthe burial to a thatch of knotted sticks,I eagerly peered into an opening, rummaged through empty afterwork to find clumped feathers and a wing, partially intact. Digging further, I hit upon a skull, then another. The first, that of a petite bird,a swallow perhaps – its vertebrae like the cast mould of an unset jewel. The second was clearly that of the magpie.I stepped back and stood staring into the hollowed-out eyes, the gone brain,spiralling and turning it upside down, prying the underside with my eye, thumbing and spinning it into a circle, thinking,and even speaking: I know what the cycle serves, but what is being served by the cycle? It’s arguable, I know – best to just walk and fall in love with the field, the beloved range of the ubiquitous grass. Grace There was something in the rain, in the way it fell.Something in the way of the birds. And in the way of the river. Something in the way it fell.Something about how the river rose, and about the stillness of the birds on the banks in the rainand about the way the air made it feel possible to forgive –and be forgiven. Todd Turner
