Hal G.P. Colebatch: Two Poems

                         Booragoon Lake

                        (With thanks to Ian Argyle)

A busy, noisy highway lined

With close-packed houses of the less-interesting kind.

Turn left at the first corner,

Then left between the houses,

Walk a few paces away from the road.

Green rises. Sounds change. A tangle

Of wild bushes grows higher.

Another few paces,

And there spread, unexpected,

Is a great blue lake, lined with deep ranks of bush,

With long-necked tortoises and tiger-snakes,

With ducks and coots, swamp-hens and standing cranes.

Frog choruses.

And now, filling the sky

Changing the colours of the branches

Come ibis in hundreds to roost.

And there will be

A full moon rising soon.

  At Thomson Bay, Rottnest

To see his seven-year-old’s wonder

As we collect

The little top-shells and dove-shells

On the gold beach

In the last tiny ripples

With the white pelican sailing by

And with the blue-green water of the bay

Helps heal the world.

                                                  Hal G.P. Colebatch