Above his desk it is written:
‘I wish I knew the names of all the birds.’
I know this room through tessellation of leaf and branch,
wurahŋ-bil and jaran-gir,
in the shade of a kulsetsi —
(Cherokee) ‘honey locust’ [a flowering tree].
I am relearning these hills and saltwaters
and all the places wrapped around this room
We both have dagahral here,
lovers/fathers/friends/conquerors/
ghosts.
But here, in this new and ancient place,
I ask him to name the song that swoops through this mosaic:
Sometimes it is wattlebird sometimes it is currawong —
when we drive, he tells me king parrot, fairy wren, black cockatoo
and I know jalwahn and bilin bilin and ngarehr
but the rest are just nunganybil,
the rest are just: ‘bird’
It is hard to unlearn a language:
to unspeak the empire,
to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,
a topographic intonation.
So in this place the shape of my place
I am trying to sing like hill and saltwater,
to use old words from an old country that I have never walked on:
bundjalung jagum ngai, nganduwal nyuyaya,
and god, I don’t even know
if I’m saying it right.
But I watch the bark twist:
grey and slate and vanilla and vermillion
he tells me this is ribbon gum —
so I find five words for this bark
and I promise I will learn them all
Because to hold him is to hold the tree
that holds these birds I cannot name,
and a word spoken here
might almost sound like home.
We are relearning this place through poetry:
I open my book and say, wayan,
here is a word which means road, but also root
and in it I am rooted, earthed,
singing between two lands
I learn that balun is both river and milky way,
and that he is baray-gir, the youngest child
and the top of the tree,
where the gahr will come to rest —
to call its own name
across the canopy,
long after his word for it
is gone.
Read the rest of Overland 223
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