A Eulogy for My Friends
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Carried by an oversea tropical wind,
a bird, last of his kind, sings.
He sings to a mate that will never come.
Consort of no one.
His feathers are the color of
onyx and tropical sands.

His voice warns;
Do not forget me, but nor should you mourn me.
I will be here, in another time, another place.
He sings, later, in the halls of the angels.

Between a huddle of palms, on a distant shore,
A flightless bird sits in her empty nest.
Squeaking creatures, sent by the beach men, had long taken its contents.
But she sits anyway, for she does not know what to do.
Dumb bird, one of the beach men says, as he pokes at her.
Free bird, she thinks to herself, as she closes her eyes.

Pink flesh glides through the moss shaded brine of the Basin.
The moonlight casts a spotlight on the Amazonian rocks.
He snags a couple of panicking fish, as they flee rapidly upstream.
In the early hour, he hits a rough noose of fishing line.
His world turns dark.

A gentle behemoth passes through the great blue.
The ocean colours are the jade seats of a theatre.
The distant cries of gulls are its conductors.
Lone beast, for her mother was taken long ago.
Lone calf, along a sea of glittering stars.
She will pass alone on the stage of the great blue.

The Tasmanian sun wafts through iron bars.
Somewhere, some place, he can hear the birds.
He rises, to eat a midmorning meal of meat scraps.
He yawns and scratches himself.
He wonders if the birds will still sing later,
long after he is gone.
He ponders if he will still get to hear them.

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