Australia

Green twilight on continental shelf:

Vast submarine kelp forests

Undulate in slanting sunlight.

A male seahorse paying court

Circles his intended,

Inflating his womb-pouch for a deposit,

Writhing in coital tango to fertilize the eggs

And glue them fast with sperm.

Philoprogenitive octopi

Flash and tangle, trysting on a ledge.

Voracious crayfish scavenge over the bottom,

Appeasing one another’s cannibal tastes.

A myriad phyllosomas swim towards the light.

Negotiating the frond-slalom, riding rock-channel surges,

Seals surf shoreward on each exhilarating swell.

A right whale breaches with thunderclap ardour,

Roistering down the tempest, flukes extended.

Gyring currents mesh in delicate clockwork,

Frisking leviathan islands’ shores.


Humpbacks sing southwards to the mating ground,

Varying their epic compositions year by year.

The Barrier Reef coruscates in dynamic equilibrium,

Coral polyps symbiotic with zooxanthellae.

Gorgonians fan their sieve-like bodies;

A crinoid settles, and sea whips wave,

And everywhere anemones sweep the paralytic feelers.


Moonlit seas swirl with spawn-clouds floating up.

At dawn, hundreds of fish hang in the current,

Waiting for the tide to turn.

In late summer, island sands heave and erupt,

As turtle hatchlings quake free, and run,

Kamikaze-dashing towards the waves

Through their enemies’ gauntlet.


Balletic lizards bob and sidestep on a salt lake,

Shin up the salt-cones, their look-out points.

The rains come, soaking through sand,

Awaking the frog asleep in his burrow.

Ants hang from subterranean ceilings,

Distended with nectar to regurgitate

Into their brothers’ mouths.

Multitudinous termite castles cast their shadows

Across the grasslands, north to south,

Clay, faeces and saliva shaped and packed high.


Sand dunes segue into gibber plain.

A gibberbird crouches over its nest,

Umbriferous wings repeating gibber-patterns.

Subtle lizards lurk in saline basins,

Blent with crystal hillocks’ scintillation.


Arenaceous rivers chunder out of rugged ranges,

Fossils mesmerised inside precipices.

River red gums flaunt white festoons

Of cockatoos, in hundreds, reposing.

Pungent eucalypts drip flammable oils.

Marsupials and eutherians-marvellous sects-

Roam telepathically over the land.

Kangaroos stand toe to toe, grappling,

Seeking the optimum aikido stunt,

Duelling for female favours.