Incantation
What do oceans talk about, or trees? What do predators and prey shout to each other in the night? What name does the doe give the fawn as it lies in the grass catching its breath? Rachel Boughton, ‘The Stone Woman Gives Birth’ Picking apples – they’re small and hard this year after a dry summer, the unthinned fruit bunched together, tart-sweet, but the seeds of the mid-season varieties are dark now and the birds and animals have begun to eat. Parrots and silvereyes and yellow wattlebirds and possums in the branches, pademelons and swans on the ground. We leave some for all of them. There are still blackberries on the bushes but not for much longer. I cook both sweet and savoury dishes with the apple-blackberry combination. High clear cool days as the sun angles lower, the air golden, marvellous to taste and full of the whistling of starling flocks. Another of the young swans has died – only one left now, of the four