Pelicans
by Lisa Brockwell
Something in the slow gait of their wings says
fuck you. They don’t mind dominating the scene.
A grey silk estuary of fine boned terns,
spoonbills, black swans from a chocolate box
and the pelicans crash into my line of vision
like a gunship, tilting the landscape off its axis.
One dwarfs the top of a lamp post. Odd, but
nothing like a circus elephant forced to
balance on a piano stool, the applause
worse than jeers and no chance of escape, not
even the feel of earth beneath her feet.
When I was a girl I was too large;
by ten I was built on a different scale
entirely to the approved models,
the little slips of things, slivers of
pink with lisps and tidy hair, no scabs.
I blundered around the playground
with all the grace of Godzilla but none
of his confidence. There’s a flinty mob
in me that wants to join in the laughter
but I don’t see the Lamb of God in the pelican,
that old Catholic symbol has it wrong.
She’d never let herself be nailed to a cross
or scratch open her heart to feed her chicks.
Who would feed them tomorrow, then? No, the
bloom on her chest just a mess of spewed fish;
something in the slow gait of their wings says.
After spending a large chunk of her adult life in England, Lisa Brockwell now lives near Mullumbimby on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, with her husband and son. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport and Magma prizes, and this year she won second place in the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival poetry prize. She is working towards a first collection.