High up on the rock face a shifting wind bellow-sweeps
at feather grass on the last inch of cliff.
A warring sun on St. Paul’s Lookout blinding
with its silver shards setting ocean cove on fire.
Where a hooded plover—pink-legged swift shore-runner
winkle-pecked in washed-up kelp returns often to its egg-scrape
—just a childhood memory. Once you have seen
two sea-swallows’ perfect-paired flutterless-glide and
their imposing shadows as twin-clear in form on white sand
you can not go back. This day of your mother’s death
an albatross with its precision-cut wing-tips never touched
the half mile of unbroken wave, its long sea-passage
past melting islands, to disappear into the southern mists.
About this poem
The backdrop of this poem came from exploring the coastline of Diamond Bay, near Portsea. There is a lookout there called St. Paul’s lookout, so thoughts about St. Paul, his spiritual blindness and the sad news of a death became mixed in with the soul of birds and landscape. In this poem, I allow nature to be the arbitrator of feelings. Around the time I wrote this poem, I was reading traditional poets such as Yeats, Blake and Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins has clearly influenced the sounds of language and attention to rhythm.
About Michelle Leber
Michelle Leber has been a guest at local and interstate poetry readings, festivals and community events. She lives near the beaches of Port Philip Bay and draws inspiration from this natural world. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies, newspapers, journals, ecology bulletins and high school texts. Her collection, “The Weeping Grass”, was published by The Australian Poetry Centre (New Poet Series 2010). She is currently working on a verse novel about the Yellow Emperor of China.
