Birds – Poems By Judith Wright

Judith Arundell Wright (31 May 1915 – 25 June 2000) was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. 

Judith Wright was born in Armidale, New South Wales. The eldest child of Phillip Wright and his first wife, Ethel, she spent most of her formative years in Brisbane and Sydney. 

Wright was of Cornish ancestry. After the early death of her mother, she lived with her aunt and then boarded at New England Girls' School after her father's remarriage in 1929. 

After graduating, Wright studied Philosophy, English, Psychology and History at the University of Sydney. At the beginning of World War II, she returned to her father's station to help during the shortage of labour caused by the war. 

Wright's first book of poetry, The Moving Image, was published in 1946 while she was working at the University of Queensland as a research officer
. 
Then, she had also worked with Clem Christesen on the literary magazine Meanjin, the first edition of which was published in late 1947. 

In 1950 she moved to Mount Tamborine, Queensland, with the novelist and abstract philosopher Jack McKinney. 

Their daughter Meredith was born in the same year. They married in 1962, but Jack was to live only until 1966. 

In 1966, she published The Nature of Love, her first collection of short stories, through Sun Press, Melbourne. 

Set mainly in Queensland, they include 'The Ant-lion' ,'The Vineyard Woman', 'Eighty Acres', 'The Dugong', 'The Weeping Fig' and 'The Nature of Love', all first published in The Bulletin. 

With David Fleay, Kathleen McArthur and Brian Clouston, Wright was a founding member and, from 1964 to 1976, President, of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. She was the second Australian to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, in 1991. 

For the last three decades of her life, she lived near the New South Wales town of Braidwood. Allegedly, she had moved to the Braidwood area to be closer to H. C. Coombs, who was based in Canberra. 

Birds 

Whatever the bird is, is perfect in the bird. 
Weapon kestrel hard as a blade's curve, 
thrush round as a mother or a full drop of water, 
fruit-green parrot wise in his shrieking swerve 
all are what bird is and do not reach beyond bird.

Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do 
cruel kestrel dividing in his hunger the sky, 
thrush in the trembling dew beginning to sing, 
parrot clinging and quarrelling and veiling his queer eye
all these are as birds are and good for birds to do. 


But I am torn and beleaguered by my own people.
The blood that feeds my heart is the blood they gave me, 
and my heart is the house where they gather and fight 
for dominion all different, all with a wish and a will to save me, 
to turn me into the ways of other people. 
If I could leave their battleground for the forest of a bird 

I could melt the past, the present and the future 
in one and find the words that lie behind all these languages. 
Then I could fuse my passions into one clear stone 
and be simple to myself as the bird is to the bird.