If I were a poet,
I would balance each word upon
the many scarlet tongues of the bottle brush:
suspended between sunlight and shade,
and sipped by stripe-bellied honeyeaters
with perfectly pointed beaks.
If I were a poet,
I would lay down my empty page
by memory’s leaning bough:
shedding crescents of silvery-grey and pale brown;
skirted by hollow seeds, faded blossom and
the forgotten sheathes of trees.
If I were a poet,
I would not seek to fasten my poems to the sky,
for these words are like the fallen things:
only shadows and shimmer-shapes
of what has never been born and never dies,
but only quickens and subsides.
Milmeray, 2012
