On the Writing of a Feminist Poem

by Jessica L. Wilkinson

Just because I am staring out the window—at the tallest

stringybark some thirty metres away (yes, about that far),

where a kookaburra was, just a minute ago, perched on a

high branch reaching sideways: that bird I used to loathe

(I was too self-conscious, its throaty laughter I would take

as an affront) but now I’ve grown to love because I’m more

attentive to her impressive chest (come close, I want to say

and let me ruffle through that creamy colour with my weird

fingers): she’s since flown off in that way they do, a bit un-

balanced, like a bayonet mounted on a firearm: in her place,

a rosella surveys the yard, her eyes much sharper than mine

(I’m sure of it) and triangulating insects in the grass: it’s so green,

so green out there, like a radical carpet (we’ve had unusual rain

this past Winter) and I wish I could be like her, with good vision:

that I could wake up in the morning and see my own feet,

my fingers with their gnawed ends reaching for the alarm

and not the netted blur that makes precision a kind of laboured

task: it’s two months through Spring and still a little cold:

I dress in layers, so this cardigan has stretched a few sizes up:

I am so daggy and so bored (so bored and tired), even though

the world out there is magnificent and not at all like my heart:

that grey between the trees intensifies the green, like a musical

joke, a feat of misdirection: she’s gone already, a flash of red

across the yard and out of frame: I’m talking about the rosella,

but things are pretty shifty: how a magpie wheels around and

down to stick its beak into the dirt, pulls at a worm that took

all day to get from bush to twig and now it’s dead: there are

so many flying things about, attuned to the moments I would

grossly pin to a timeline: no wonder the poet’s obsession with

birds and being envious of plumage and organic coasting on air,

even though that envy is bullshit, as if the bird is free and grateful,

as if the bird is overwhelmed with soaring majesty, as we are,

imagining ourselves out of the animal kingdom and into the green

encroaching on the gravel driveway from lack of visitors these past

two years: the green recovery, like a little note to say that, despite

everything, the world without us will be alright: I’m coasting about,

nestless and hungry behind glass: and the grey sky is rolling and heavy

and the kookaburra is back in the stringybark and the green breaks

once more through my own wheeling distractedness—doesn’t mean

that you can interrupt me.                      Please don’t interrupt me.