Selected poems
Morphing into autumn
Now the snakes are slinking into hiding,
sensing frost to come,
coiled in ouroboros dreams of Spring;
Giant stinging trees conserve their toxin
for their enemies, the uninitiated ones
who blunder, ignorant of risk;
Richmond birdwing embryos,
emerged from chrysalids long since,
have primed their stained-glass opulence
of silken wings and flown hence;
diaphanous thin moonstone mist
laps the western plains at dawn,
so that distant ranges loom
as shadow archipelagos;
the artist's eyes of Hokusai would light up
at the sight of faded blues and amethysts,
the geomorphic folds of continent,
and reach for brush and inks to capture
beauty's evanescent face:
a landscape shimmering with myth,
masked in ambient mystique
that renders it both ancient
and eternally reborn.
Giant stinging trees
Most unapproachable of trees, their highnesses
and majesties, hostile to human travellers
who trespass on their territory, are in command
of glassy armouries: cilia on surfaces
of stems and leaves that target skin,
a company of archers whose unerring barbs
drive their victims half-insane with agony.
Beware the lofty ogres of the rainforest,
grim guardians whose dark fruit proves
benign to just a favoured few — green catbirds,
regent bowerbirds; skeletal vestiges of leaves
bear witness to the appetites of busy chrysomelids.
Insidious and instant shock
impact of these hermetic beings —
the neurotoxin sealed in silicon —
fascinates warmongers with its wizardry.
It's claimed the toxin of such trees
stays potent for a century, each hair a vial
of utmost pain, nature's torture without balm,
for if there is an anodyne, we've yet to learn its name.
Giant Stinging Tree: Dendrocnide excelsa.
Chrysomelids: leaf beetles.
Regent bowerbirds
The art of taxidermy is to render dead things lifelike.
These five male regent bowerbirds appear
convincingly alive, as if they'd just alighted
on the cover of The Queenslander (issue for July 13, 1933),
resplendent in sunflower gold and satin black,
one displayed with wings half-raised, as if anticipating flight.
Some avid bird-collector prized this item, I suppose,
as curio, a parlour centrepiece. In an age when ladies wore
small birds to ornament their hats — the gaudier the plumage
of the bird transposed, the more in vogue —
such vivid specimens adorned the home as talking-points
for guests, or formed a showpiece on reception desks.
Who'd ever think to venture to the rainforest, the wilderness,
to marvel at the bird's own artistry: observe his prowess
as a decorator to impress his lass; precision he deploys
in placing baubles — snail shells, pebbles, berries; wands
he paints with leaves emulsified, to form a blue-green set —
clearing space to shape a courtship bower on the forest floor,
where he'll perform to dazzle her amid this eclectic array,
so as to outdo rivals' fantasies and win the right to nest.
A dance, a dowry and a bower: what girl could resist the lure?
Agile, suave and golden-eyed, he'll sweep her off her feet.
Green catbirds
Male catbirds don't build bowers,
but they do bring offerings
of flowers, to romance a female
they desire as spouse. They like to dance.
Catbirds pair for life. Hens build
a spacious nest with twigs and vines,
cushioned with soft, rotted wood
overlaid with moss or leaves.
Nests are camouflaged aloft
in giant stinging trees, or in the crowns
of treeferns, like the nests
of regent birds, their friends.
Male catbirds, constant in their ways,
feed the chosen hen year round.
She waits for his arrival
bearing juicy gifts of fruit —
a native fig for preference
or sometimes an exotic treat:
a garnet grape she'll savour
for its nectar-scented flesh.
They'll dive and dip on days of heat
mirage, a double emerald flash,
bathing in the limpid water
cupped in joints of giant trees.
They take turns tending nestlings
when they hatch, and he does not neglect
assiduous patrols of territory
to safeguard boundaries.
Catbird, you are in my world:
it gladdens me to realise that —
but is there room for me
in your diminished habitat?
Greentime
Shadows of the greentime
mime the trauma of a brutal storm
that decimated generations,
ancestries, chronologies;
a shudder haunts tree-memory,
echoing in human pores,
agitating vegetation,
rippling the canopy
with atavistic aftershocks
from thud and bite
of axe and saw,
the rending groan
of outraged gravity
when forest elders fall.
Lyre
How might this wilderness have seemed,
early in the world and time; refulgent light
of nebulae that shimmered fitfully on seas
and glanced off spines and fronds of cycads,
zamia, primeval trees, as creatures of Earth's
burgeoning menagerie emerged from slime.
Later, wings displaced the air with sounds
like scythes and gasps and sighs,
as birds more elegant than ferns
were seen frequenting woodland, streams.
Here on pristine Tamborine, the rainforest
became the haunt of avian ventriloquists,
birds more often heard than seen,
whose raised tail plumes would simulate
the contours of an ancient lyre,
companion to the poet's voice
when Sappho lent words to desire
in lyrics of such eloquence
that hearts of listeners caught fire.
Richmond birdwing butterflies
My arrival coincides with that of butterflies,
detecting subtle signals in the ether
that denote their vine. Pliant loops
and tropes and tendrils interlacing trellises
lure them back to these life-giving colonies.
This is the nursery and the lullaby, gently undulating
beneath massive trees. The caterpillars hatch and feed,
outgrow their skins, wax plump and sleek, entering
their dormant phase within a lime-green time-capsule,
the chrysalis where they transmogrify.
Emerging with damp, crumpled wings whose veins
are pumped with haemolymph, they wait
until the jewel colours dry, when they will
assay the sky that arcs towards infinity,
glimpsed through eyelike apertures in canopies.
Inspired by a Landcare initiative, Tamborine Mountain.
Jena Woodhouse is the author/editor/translator of eight book publications in various genres, and has recently completed a collection of poems, Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems, for Calanthe Press, a new poetry publisher based on Tamborine Mountain, in south-east Queensland's rainforest country.