Russell Island, By Brian37(AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

From the veranda
Overlooking the sloped backyard
To see the beauty
Is not that hard

Mangrove trees
With octopus roots
In low tide
Attack the drying mud

Great pretender
This halfmoon lagoon
Pretending it is dry riverbed
In some scorching part of Africa

But no,
It is just a slight indentation
In my friend’s backyard
High tide will remind it

Shimmering silverback waters
No, you are not Africa
The underlying turquoise
Of the bay, will remind you

The calm tide slowly creeps in
It wants to sooth the angry roots
Lapping around them, as if
They’re photons acting like both particle and wave

Those clever double slit waters
Undulate the shadows of the roots
Swaying and snaking
Under the broccoli branch mangrove

And those chimps
Are not orangutans
Any which way but loose
They’re kookaburras

Lap, lap, lap
The tide slowly creeps in
A heavy piece of deadwood
Submerges like a Navy sub

But it is only temporary
The tide retreats
Those angry roots
Exposed again
(end)

This poem is about where my late friend Bob lived, on an island just off the tip of Victoria Point in Queensland Australia. I fell in love with his back yard the minute I saw it. In low tide the mud would dry like a riverbed in Africa, and the tide was so gentle going in and out, it would reflect the branches of the mangrove trees. FYI “Any which way but loose” is a play on the real comedy movie staring Clint Eastwood “Any Which Way But Loose”. And I don’t know why they call kookaburras “laughing” birds, they sound like they are screaming to me. But anyway, I love Russell Island and Brisbane and I got to see lots of Queensland, coastal and inland. My favorite island in the world actually is The Great Keppel Island just off the coast of Yeppoon. It is tiny, but looks like it could be a movie set in a romance or adventure movie.