I.
I heard on the radio how birds in Assam
lifted like a cloud over the camellia forest
and flew to a village in the last light.
There it was warm and filled with other wings transparent and flickering.
They dashed their bodies against the smoking lamps
and fell
into the street
on to the trodden stems of water hyacinth.

Women who had been picking tea
all day on the hillside
came down to the village
holding their baskets against their muslin skirts
and their skirts away from the bleeding feathers
in fear and surprise. There was hardly a sound
when the wings ceased to beat.

It was south of the Kahsi hills where the Brahmaputra
flows
the birds flowed to their death in the soft night.

II.
In Dar Es Salaam the morning lay on us like wet silk.
We bought fruit in thin slices, and yellow bead rings,
waiting for the news of the tornado, the hurricane, the cyclone, the typhoon
crouched in the opaque sky.

We ran before the wind
to Malagasy, to Reunion, to Mauritius
where it caught us, cast us on the beach
beside the tourist cabins and the sugar cane,
both with rats.
Port Louis was under water, we saw with dismay.
The corpses of duck dinners
floated in the dark gutter under the blind windows and past closed schools.

Reflected in this aberrant lake, old cool houses suitable for provincial nobles and for slaves
brooded under wisteria. Their columns were erected in memory of the Loire.

I remembered about the pink pigeons of Mauritius. They have tiny heads and supplicating voices,
poor flakes of pink driven out when the forest was
felled
to make way for the chateaux.
There is not one left to complain.

III.
Governor Hunter despatched
many a live bird to England
to bleach in the fog, attempt a trill
in Hove or Lockerbie
and marvel through the bars
at rain on the pale honeyed flowers
and honeyeaters dancing on the rain.

As Governor Hunter and his men marched west
the sun struck gold from epaulettes
and sparkled on the cages ready for the feather,
the bright eye, the tender claw, the beak
of the lyrebird and the cockatoo
(the rosy one, the sulphur-crested screamer, the shining
black)
and the paradise parrot of which Leach says
“it is an exquisite creature,
in general green below and blue above”
(like forest, like sky)
“with red shoulders”
(at sunset out-sparkling the governor’s gold)
“and a red forehead. It nests in sandhills.”

One hundred and eighty years later
a man is out there in the dunes
searching for the paradise parrot.
Listen as he walks, crab-scuttle on the sand.
He has not much to offer this bird
which saw the gold and heard the sound of fife and
drum.

IV.
We were in a foreign country
reading about another foreign country- —
well, hardly foreign at all
since once we saw it from a deck,
a smudge of cloud on cloud,​
Mangere Island in the lonely Chathams
twelve thousand miles away in the long fall
of grey seas — reading about its five black robins
last of their race,
news because they were about to die.
As with a few Indians along the Amazon,
robins and Indians, it’s all news.
small items only because so far away,
and small.

Rain sluiced the colonnades
where they sell the International Herald Tribune
(how to rent a palazzo, share a car to Munich, learn
Chinese)
with baseball scores from home.
Rare robins, the item said,
rare black robins, three females and two males,
the usual ratio, we’re used to It.

It’s cold on Mangere. The waves swing in across the
rocks
great shawls of kelp.
Three men were on Mangere
with tents and playing cards and paperbacks,
a radio, tins of butter, binoculars
to watch the robins, and suddenly spied
after fifteen years the orange-breasted parakeet risen again, a flame rekindled from the phoenix fire. What next? The black stilt or the kakapo?
The parrot like an owl that walks, stately, instead of
flying?
We doubt if they’ll turn up.

The birds will be reprogrammed. Not much to do with chirping, building nests or catching flies
or even flying. It’s cold on Mangere
for orange-breasted parakeets and such.

First published in Overland 91—1983