Blue, Green, Red and Purple: False Spring
Betty Collins writes of the false harbingers of an Australian spring.
So when does spring really come?
mucky dark long shadows lie long
and everything’s as cold as winter mud:
until one dingy morning,
tiny chirps pierce frosty air
and the sun gets up lusty,
flexing muscles, yawning –
a gang of lorikeet hoons have commandeered
the swelling crown of a jacaranda tree
they jostle, screech, demand supremacy, urgent, desperate -
and a couple of wattle birds sounding from everywhere and nowhere commence their raucoous calling: prk prk prk
PRRRK; prk prk prk P RRRK; prk prk prk P RRRK –
they’ll win their brides and not give over til the nestlings fly.
Alas! False harbingers! It rains again in buckets!
The very next day!
You can’t be sure that spring has really come
until the daffodils flare out..
But then again,
Perhaps the spring began
When the bulbs first
Sipped the soaking rains of autumn?
