Rosellas is what I call a five finger exercise. If you haven't already read my essay on this, you'll find it listed on the page link at the bottom of this post.

When I thought about the inspiration for this (and I sort of remember it, 47 years later), I believed I had probably mislabelled it. Our family house at Avalon was visited daily by flocks of rainbow lorikeets, so for this collection I thought about renaming it "Lorikeets." But as I entered the words onto the page I realised that those first few words, "Red and blue, flashing...." was indeed typical of the crimson rosellas that would also occasionally visit. The line "flaring into gold and green" came from the sun flaring through the leaves of the banana trees that sat on our property, through which the birds would fly (I still have photographs of that sunlight.) Later on the text seems to indicate lorikeets again, so the answer is probably that I was inspired by first one species and later the other. So I left the title alone. I guess my memory is not as perfect as I'd like it to be.

Now, in 2024, when I'm trying to bring this website and my AllPoetry page into some consistency, I've labelled it Lorikeets. But the above stands. 

More or less stream of consciousness, just reporting the images as they come to mind. But I've weaselled a bit of structure into it with various rhymes:

A-B-C-A-B-C  D-E-F-G-D-E-F-G - (last line)

Nothing earth shatteringly important, but I hope that there are some pretty phrases and imagery. The world has an abundance of "pretty" if we just open our eyes and see it.