The Billions

At the whizz of a door screen
moorhens picking through our garden
make it by a squeak into the dam
and breasting the algal water

resume their gait and pace on
submerged spectral feet, and they nod
like that half-filled Coke bottle
we saw in the infant river

as it came to its affliction
in the skinny rapids. There
it made a host of dinky bows,
jinked, spun and signalled

till it was in the calm again.
Riding wet in a wide reach of glare
it made us think of icebergs
...