Cockatoos After Fire

Mark O’Flynn

(Frst published in Blue Bottle Poetry Journal, January 2025)

for Kate Fagan

Against the empty storm clouds

those white cockatoos

like rents in canvas

drift through the air left by fire.

The clean sheets of their wings

vivid as charcoal on snow.

Acoustic cries fill the ashen void 

between scorched tree and leaden sky.

They strip the blackened bark

like metal at a car wreck

fossick with primitive impatience

on the verge of food.

What language do they croak?

what devious vernacular

of proclamation and waste?

Arranged phonetically with blundering

morphemes like hacksaws grumbling 

through the air’s dirty paragraph.

You lean from your window 

oppressed by rain

as one stone age cockatoo

in the face of desolation shrieks 

relentless greeting across the heavy sky

hello   hello   hello.