Port Elizabeth, Sydney

Delia Falconer and her partner kindly put me up when I visited Sydney for a week. Their small apartment had wonderful views, and they gave me a great room, overlooking the street (below), though I think this was taken from the living room. This is where we waited one evening to watch a cloud of fruit bats on their way to (or possibly from) Botanic Park. I wrote a poem about these bats, which I'll put below. One of the nicest comments I've received on my work was from an attaché at the Australian Embassy in Dublin, who attended a group poetry reading I was involved in. He said that a certain word I used in the poem described the bats perfectly. Thsi was all the more gratifying as the word was a made-up word or neologism (that is, the way in which I deployed it made it a neologism). Here's the poem. It's in two parts, the night vigil in the apartment and daytime in Botanic Park:

FRUIT BATS IN SYDNEY

1. Evening, Port Elizabeth

Four stories up, at the appointed hour,
we watched it begin: a scatter of sooty flakes

rose from the softlit city (an upside down chandelier)
outriders’ pterodactyl wings

smuttering, near.


2. Afternoon, Botanic Park

On the barer branches clumps
of burn-coloured fruit unhooked to hang-glide

blue gaps. Their shit anointed the paths, a loamy
counterpoint to the bustle and bloom,

invisible caves to step through.