Intro: practice outlined: [It’s about] Birds, being trans, being between cultures, language and sometimes species. FEATHERED MESSAGES: THE ONES WE TAKE FOR GRANTED.

Walk quietly into the gathering pre-dusk. val smith leads, forest kapo flickers in and out in the distance, prone – weighted, summoning portent on the path. Karakia, bracket of protection read from a phone (important, could be memorised/embodied surely), in order to enter the graveyard, ‘remember transcestors’, pause, a tui call drowns out human utterance, past, present, future emerging, merging. Carry a ringa ringa flower or a weed. 

Many hours spent in this cemetery in youthful times searching – now seasoned transed into aged and lined. Invited – ‘take time here, be with thoughts’. People disperse. 
Look towards hillside in Newtown, behind the Carillon – memorial to war, where we work with neighbours, planting for the birds, trapping the unwanted. Legions of carers all over Te Whanganui a Tara – that’s why these calls are here in this dusk.

Denis Hayes Departed this life July 15^th 1903 – 67 years RIP.

Wind picks up, blackbird startle call, shrill. People sit quietly, scattered over the hillside, sound of city behind. forest kapo draped on grave (4 Cosgraves lie here), val smith incognito in grass.

Departed this life 1890. Who?
Died 7^th Nov 1885 45 Requiscent in Pace. Rita Taverna Corrado.

Loved ones laid together. Two tuis blast through in intricate choreo. Rory bumblers on the horizon.

Beloved, wife, mother. Be here for a while, a while is a long sliver of time.
Another: Died July 15^th 1883 aged 14 joined by big brother Died June 6^th 1895 Aged 52.

Kaka – raucous bogun! Feather messengers flurry here amidst spirits. Gray warbler trills, the sound of joy or sorrow, depends on perspective. Blackbird starts to chortle – his spring(fuck me) song. Tuis come back drunk on Ti Kouka flower nectar, starling glides through. 
The wind is now cold. Careful not to walk on those lying. Sit. Smell of the earth, grass, fennel, old man’s beard, oxalis, dandelion, chick and onion weeds, pohutakawa, camelia, death lilies. forest kapo moves from ground to skywards in imploring lunge posture.

The wind gets colder, fallen pohutukawa leaves – ruby lips. If left -in a graveyard to one’s own devices, the ghost of the Romantics, will drench you in poetry. Dickinson – maybe Baxter flit through. Shake it off. Back to the botanical. Ringaringas not just white flowers, can be purple.

Single file goat track to exit, nod to headstone cross strangled by vines. Remove the tapu, return to noa, cleansed with water from a single use plastic bottle (is there a better vessel for this purpose?).

Back inside, the senses contained between dark brooding concrete walls, sitting on dead animal furs. Canned birds and boxed pink dawn/dusk – poetry stripped, lulled into the nuance of the soundtrack, tendrils connect us via a booming Aussie bird. What is being thought? Said? By the birds by everyone who has passed through? What is fake, what is real? Dancers once, now pedestrians move position to position making their slow exit, pausing to look, is that ‘wistfully’ no too emotional, ‘pragmatically’ out a window, then evaporate leaving a woman who has captured birds in her phone. 

Disappeared – releasing, relinquishing. Trans, transform, transcendetalate, transmute, transbody – we have skittered on the surface of something deeper. Digging would yield the root vegetables.

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