Moonbird
After reading Mary Oliver’s ‘Swan’
Did you see him advance toward
the empty station, brow twisted
like a broken track; once again,
flinching from the light, carrying
the forgotten stone of the morning?
Were you beside his careful thinking:
the bedecked cliff, the tender knife?
Did you make a path for him, the one
who is alive yet still, who is hanging
from a familiar schedule while a flood
approaches and dissipates? The one
who now stops, feels a disruption
and shrugs; the one who halts to gape
at distant gardens, yet cannot see
the sprouting lilies that scrape
the underside of his face.
Amanda Anastasi (she/her) is a poet who lives in Melbourne, Australia and the author of Taking Apart the Bird Trap (Recent Work Press, 2024) and The Inheritors (Black Pepper, 2021). Amanda was Poet in Residence for three years at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub and is the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship. She has been published in journals locally and internationally, including in Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Science Writing, Griffith Review and The Massachusetts Review.