We breathe again the cool morning air after another stifling night, force our weariness outdoors to smell the tall yellow grass bleached into silence. The eucalypts have shed their brittle strips of bark like dirty laundry about their feet, and on the track the dull shells of Christmas beetles shuffle in the dust. Overhead a raucous cloud of cockatoos, and three discarded feathers, bright as sulphur, fall like treasure and land at our feet.

Maggie Shapley

 

Maggie Shapley is an archivist by profession and a poet by vocation. Her first collection was Proof (Recent Work Press 2017), and her work has been published in anthologies, literary journals and on Canberra buses.

© 2019