Theme and Variation

Christmas with cicadas, storm…

1.

Christmas morning, massed cicada choruses
tune eucalypts, whose alabaster
trunks and limbs and laminated
crescent leaves reflect the sun, deflecting
blows of heat like multilayered shields.

Night interprets landscape with an enigmatic
density, in moody shifts from indigo
to shiverings of incandescence,
sultry threat of migraine
enervated by percussive accents.

Eucalypts that echoed with ebullience
of morning sun, now vibrate like tuning
forks, sensing turbulence to come.
As torrents, glistening like strings
in epileptic flickerings, send convulsive

quiverings of energy through foliage,
the gums succumb to force majeure,
swaying with unleashed desire,
like native trees caught in the vortex
of a raging forest fire.




2.

Feast of the Nativity -
cicadas shrilly stridulate
in oleating eucalypts
and summer's leafy
Chinese elms.

Points of sound like sun-motes
dance and tingle in the synapses,
notes separating from the mass
like violins in a master-class.



*Christmas Day in (one part of)
Australia, 25.12.2004