Four things in the World

The sun was still high as I stepped from the hermitage, but waning, it cast the trunks of ghost gums and other pale limbed trees in orange. The grass across the road has come up green all of a sudden. Two weeks ago, it was bone dry.

Four things I noticed in the world today.

• A gum tree with the lower part of its trunk dead and grey while the rest of it twisted up and away beyond the roofs.
• A flock of green parrots darting through the trees in the park
• A vapour trail hanging high in the distance over the studio apartment blocks.
  
• Half a pale white ghost of a moon in the northern edge of sky.
  

Bird on a Roof

undated notes from last years journal...

Through the gums across the road, the sun is setting and the sky is all white through the trees. A willy wagtail dropped onto the telephone wires as I sat at the picnic table, satisfied by my evening meal. the evening is appropriate for this time of year. Very warm. Pleasantly so. First hot evening this month.

the willy wagtail is cast above me in silhouette. His tail waggles to and fro, carving back and forth in the air. He dips down on the wires, like a little acrobat or tightrope walker. Clinging on with his little talons on his splayed little twig legs. He dips back up again. His arrow like head and his white eyebrows giving him the look of an angry little Italian man.

Then, he flits up, arcs back through the trees in the front yard and alights on the apex of our roof. Chattering away. He's all by himself up there. A bird on a roof.

Whtie Necked Herons and Exercise Bikes

There was the same white Heron stalking the shallows under the freeway yesterday. But I am not sure if it was a white necked Heron( like this one) or an easern Egret. Egrets seem smaller than this, but the bird I saw under the bridge was all white, like the Eastern Egret. I cycled past three different humpies( At least, what I thought were humpies) on my travels along the creek and coast.

There have been some improvements to the large corrugated one near the White Herons home.. as I sailed past in the January heat, I did a double take when out of the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted an exercise bike among the broken chairs, chip wrappers and bluestone rubble under the bridge. Positioned parallel to the creek, facing north, it was.

By the popular strip of beach that ribbons its way for several kilometres, through trendy beach side suburbs, someone had pitched a tent in the bushes at the edge of a large coastal park where families come to have barbeques and play holiday cricket. An old rusty bicycle was shoved in the bushes.

Close by the corrugated iron humpy with the exercise bike, a very crude dwelling had been erected by the fence of the train yards, on the other side of the creek, with a blue plastic tarpolin, and bits of wood to hold it in place.

How many of these dwellings exist in a city of four million people? How many ghosts stalk the edges fo society like white herons stalking the muddy banks of a ditch? Their beauty, humaness and tears unseen, and unoticed by passing traffic.