Black Bittern
Ixobrychus flavicollis
You stood where you’d perched for a million years waiting
for us. On a reed bed next to an algae-scum topped swamp;
your chicken’s weight bending a stalky ouroboros to the tea-
stained water like a tightrope walker’s wire drooping towards
a shark tank. We’d never seen you before. We’d heard of you.
Had heard you were shy & hard to see, never having seen any
of your cousins. You weren’t impatient. In fact, you didn’t run
like we thought you would. No darting into the cane phalanx
where your long-pointed bill might have stabbed its way into
the closed fibrous ranks like a spearman. She’d come skipping
back down the sandy track towards us. She’d spotted your type
first again; her brain’s eureka moment, those golden-shouldered
parrots at Artemis station. Her knack for being in the righteous
place at the fateful time like avoiding a pile-up on the Bruce Hwy.
We sat down & watched you. You had white streaks in your black
neck feathers as though dressed in a convict’s uniform. You were
a statue of some condemned person listening to a court’s decision.
Instead of an Adam’s apple bobbing in your nervous throat, a yellow
purse hung under your beak, soft as calf skin; vibrating with a vein’s
regular pulse. A jaundiced tongue quivering in illness, it undulated
as bright coral polyps sway in a warm current without will – jailed
by instinct, signaling caution with the yellow card nature gave you.
for us. On a reed bed next to an algae-scum topped swamp;
your chicken’s weight bending a stalky ouroboros to the tea-
stained water like a tightrope walker’s wire drooping towards
a shark tank. We’d never seen you before. We’d heard of you.
Had heard you were shy & hard to see, never having seen any
of your cousins. You weren’t impatient. In fact, you didn’t run
like we thought you would. No darting into the cane phalanx
where your long-pointed bill might have stabbed its way into
the closed fibrous ranks like a spearman. She’d come skipping
back down the sandy track towards us. She’d spotted your type
first again; her brain’s eureka moment, those golden-shouldered
parrots at Artemis station. Her knack for being in the righteous
place at the fateful time like avoiding a pile-up on the Bruce Hwy.
We sat down & watched you. You had white streaks in your black
neck feathers as though dressed in a convict’s uniform. You were
a statue of some condemned person listening to a court’s decision.
Instead of an Adam’s apple bobbing in your nervous throat, a yellow
purse hung under your beak, soft as calf skin; vibrating with a vein’s
regular pulse. A jaundiced tongue quivering in illness, it undulated
as bright coral polyps sway in a warm current without will – jailed
by instinct, signaling caution with the yellow card nature gave you.
B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His tenth poetry collection, The Eromanga Sea (Calanthe Press) and his eleventh book, Extinction Sonnets (Walleah Press) are forthcoming in 2025/2026.