Imagining the song of the New Zealand Tui bird
from ten thousand miles away is apt work for a poet,
blind cartographer of the wild uncharted places
of the human heart. The English, on first glance,
named you Parson Bird as you are clothed in a dark suit
with a white collar, but no droning sermonizer are you.
Is “tui” the sound you call to the ears of the Maori?
They say you possess two voice boxes — a poet’s envy –
so that your lovely bellbird-like notes are underlain
with clicks, cackles, groans and the creaks of wooden ships
on rolling seas, a concerto for flute and precussion,
and like parrots, the gift of human speech. You sing
to the full moon above the sparkling South Pacific.
Your wings beat loud and crisp like the flapping
of thumbed stiff pages in a new book of poems
or the card sharp’s shuffling that signals the deal.
I see you banking through dark dense forest,
your crest dusted with yellow pollen grains, drunk
on fermented flax nectar and joyful flight and life.
I hear your voice in the tinkling spoon in a cup of tea
of honeybush, cinnamon, cloves, horopito and ginger.
Your song drifts on the gentle morning breeze
off the cool September seas of the Hauraki Gulf,
wending through vineyards and olive groves,
from the beaches to the hilltops, aloft with
the sweet and tender musings of a fanciful mind.
