Look there. That bird.
It's real enough, and I can see
the fine leaves of the casuarina quiver
as it crashes onto the branches
in an almost random fluttering ; in the way
that a drunk might crash his way
through bushland undergrowth .

Nothing delicate, nothing careful about it.
Nor do I know
if, as a bird, it could in any way be described
as simply care free.   

But at least it is real. It is not a thing
to be smothered under words that show no more
than my own abstract reaction.

I myself am not careless of its being.

I can summon abstract nouns to tell just what I feel.

Or perhaps tell what I should feel in that passive way
that observers summon up;  pleasure, delight, the gamut
of all those Romantic emotions expressed  
in nature poets' observations for long ages past.
But I am too self centred and cannot but relate
that bird's existence to my own.


And there. That tree.  
Once more it has begun to prove its point.

Maybe casually one could claim
that it has succumbed to Spring's green goading.

But, as with the bird, I find  
that it relates to me only as exemplar;
the bird, less permanent, the tree more permanent

and  I ....