At wet and ragged autumn dusk
I put on my Tasmanian tiger shirt
and run, loping, through the park.
I jog between gatherings of native trees,
the olive greens oddly set
in a carpet-bolt of emerald turf.
I pant up to a tatty oak feeding between ponds
of blue-green algae and gigantic carp.
Here, a stick waved incautiously overhead
could bring down a pair of wings
from any one of twenty species.
A rain-squall blusters about;
I lean into the oak's lee-ward side.
The tree sways; the body sways
and the spine goes up, and up, and branches out;
and a multitude of starlings clings to my hair.
They slit their eyes against driven rain
and hunker down against the uplift
from a colder south, twittering
about flight-paths to India:
"Perhaps this year we'll gather up the generations
and go back."
Sydney's in a snarl all around the park
as the starlings take an experimental turn.
Let's stay a little longer:
the clouds are turning pink, and look!
there's a nosy ibis, wheeling with the flock.