Cockatoos After Fire
Mark O’Flynn
(Frst published in Blue Bottle Poetry Journal, January 2025)
for Kate Fagan
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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.
Mark O’Flynn is an Australian writer who has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Undercoat, and Einstein’s Brain. His novels include The Last Days of Ava Langdon, (UQP, 2016), Grassdogs (Harper Collins, 2006) and The Forgotten World (HC, 2013). He lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
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