wildu - aquila audax

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Wildu – Aquila audax
for Joe McKenzie


Slow to leave the roo somebody’d hit last night,
a wedge-tailed eagle wobbles starving into the up and
lurches to stare from sixty metres off as we draw to a halt.
“There’s another one dead over there” you say.

His gizzards unrolling in the sun, talons locked open.
I pull feathers to freshen my dead brother’s hat.
The highway kills its carrion addicts,
and these wingtips are worn half way through

from years of mothy heaving ’gainst the tarmac to escape.
He’d lost his grasp of air, finally rising so slow
he got splattered with his beak full. Too easy to miss.
Now the female’s twitching to resume her feast.

Can she know? Does she feel it go?
They found the hat in a place like this.


Philip White



















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