Les Murray: Platypus

Once in an April moon
Lapped in dark water
Or in some forest pool
Behind midsummer
You may discern him, still
In rippling shade,
Or see him tilt and glide,
Leaving few bubbles,
Sunk to the cool of his nest
In the roots of the creekbed.

Go down no further. Let us watch from here.
Shadows of scrub lie windless on the water.
Flat-headed, his otter-like body dark as soil,
Small eyes, crude fur and that patent-leather beak,
Blunt limbs and webbed feet
Held just below the light,
He floats and is there.
He has not heard us come.
Not strange, across so vast
A plain of time.

Twice born, and yet a mammal—with a beak.
But see, now he sinks away, perhaps to feed
On the leaf-dark bottom, or to find the mouth
Of his burrow and smear the earth wall as he climbs
And scrambles up to doze there in the darkness.

Hold the thought of him

Kindly to your skin.

It is good to have him in our country,

Unique, beneath our thoughts,

To nurture difference.

Changeless beneath our thought

And its disjunctions.

From The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969). Not great Murray: his 'Echidna' is better. But perhaps the only tolerable serious poem about the platypus (and the line Unique, beneath our thoughts is perfect). Banjo Patterson's piece of verse is execrable. Predictably there are several lugubriously comic platypus poems, so Murray's poem helps to right the balance.