Sarah Holland-Batt: Orange-bellied Parrot

In the British Museum, its seed-green head
dreams under polished glass
of a long wing-hammering flight south

down through the mosquito net latitudes,
the dark, banana-flanked islands
hunkered in blue archipelagos,

dots of monsoon shacks
on fleeting beaches, cane
plantations streaming wires of smoke,

dropping down, down, further south
to its home country, the grim
scrim of marram and marsh rosemary

marking the boundary of what it knows,
where the turpentine stink
of eucalypts closes in like prison air,

the unending scribbly gums
menace their silver knives,
and the scrawny catstails of casuarinas

whip and whip an uncharted sky.
Its emissary heart wheels out,
sprout-green, staghorn-green,

looking for a familiar tzeet, tzeet
in the chipped dialect of corellas,
the chitter of greenfinches,

the cockatoos' and blue-wings' squall,
and, finding nothing but
the roar of parrot talk at dusk

rising hot in its ears, the sour honey
of currants in its throat, it would float
into the leaves like a ghost, green on green,

and from its black coral beak
let its voice inch out on a branch,
a quick orange flare in the thicket.


From The Hazards (2015). An explosion of the exotic in which the anthropomorphism, or at least the impossible attempt to speak for a bird, is jarringly invasive. The first three stanzas, introducing the specimen in the British Museum and a fictitious migration homewards, take the poem in a direction that isn't subsequently developed - but add an echo of strangeness to the already unknowable. There's something compelling about the poem's nervous unachievedness.