Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos

by Lenora Cole

four sentinels
aurum-crowned entitlement
expectant
curious  grey tongue gentled
with husk-cracking satisfaction

smaller, gaudy lorikeets shriek
their caustic intimidation
unruly arrival, hunched and hissing
food-motivated to disrupt
the pecking order

still, one candle-coloured cockatoo
remains, stumped rear-toe sidles
and whiskered-visor streaky beak
slowly pinches the soft fat of my upper-arm
marble-shiny eye
whirling cleverness in
wrinkled frame, insistent
for more seed
warm feathers press my skin
fan-layered like an infinity of lotus flowers
white as sun-bleached bone

Lenora Cole is an Australian poet. Her work has been published in print in Australian Poetry Anthology, The Tundish Review, Jacaranda, and Concrescence, and online in Umbel & Panicle, honey & lime, and Déraciné, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. In 2019 she received the Emerging Author Award for the New England Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing.