We hear their voices echo across the estuary

fathers, mothers, and children fishing, 
an old man with a cane walks up the steep track

a lyre bird is scraping among the ferns
Every imagined finch, and the whip bird’s call is a guess

you spot the dry cormorant, self-grooming
and tell me stories of canoeing the Lane Cove River,

your mother’s compassionate eyes, the ancestral home
at Greenwich, asking what patch of blue is the sky?

Cornflower, I say, though later, it turns an eggshell blue
Later, in the blurred catastrophe of phone cameras

evening bruised me with lost childhoods
We talk about nuclear emissions, the sharp air

how many lives destroyed before Putin’s tyranny is spent?
The mangrove leaves glitter despite toxic chemicals,

rising sea levels, microplastics in storm waters
No one is to blame for the moon’s abrupt, ironic face;

a shadow drawn over my incurable days