BIRDS
Birds are different and more difficult for us mammals to read. They have such small heads, yet the intelligence of members of the parrot and crow families is truly impressive. Our chickens which were admittedly of varied breeds all had quite distinct personalities. It is horrible to think of their fate in factory egg and chicken meat production.
Pheasant
The cock pheasant came to my door,
An apparition shimmered there.
Robin hooded in satin green,
El Zorro masked in carmine red,
Raleigh ruffed in ermine white,
D’Artagnan cloaked in oriflamme.
I fed him for his brazenness.
The lion laid down with the lamb.
The pheasant in his heroic garb
Invites wholehearted admiration
And a blast of envious buckshot
With his devil-may-care display
And arrogance of his array.
The swift and terrible peregrine,
That plummets down to blow apart
Some homing pigeon on the wing,
Has the raw beauty of power
And killing sleek efficiency.
The clockwork pheasant, that whirs
And rattles closely overhead
With alarmed indignant squawk,
Rivals in aerodynamic grace
The Brothers Wright at Kitty Hawk.
Why should the drab and dowdy hen
From the safety of her camouflage
Be wooed by something gaudy hued?
Why should she ruffle feather, care
Whether his wattles be scarlet?
What is it to such a Juliet,
His cape be Montague or Capulet?
Perhaps his beauty coincides
With the colour chart in her brain,
Just as we besotted human males
Are hardwired to appreciate
The classic woman’s hills and dales.
But why do we find the pheasant
So full of visual bright appeal?
A beauty we cannot ever own.
And why do some impotent men
Shoot this comic aviator,
Blast the Red Baron from the skies,
Smear his golden plumage with blood,
Lay his limp lifeless body down
Where the colour seeps into the sod?
Speaking Hen
As a pushy pullet I chirrup “perrrrk puk puk puk”,
As I dust bath in the sandy dirrrrt muck muck muck
And preen and clean and smirrrrk smug smug smug.
Sip and toss back my head to slurrrp glug glug glug.
You humans toddle off to worrrrk shuck shuck shuck
As front desk dolly bird or clerrrrk yukk yukk yukk
Or on Sundays sit in churrrch up-chuck chuck.
While I’m still squatting on my perrrch stuck stuck stuck
Head under wing, an avian quirrrrk tuck tuck tuck.
Speaking Chick
Through undergrowth chicks creep – peep peep!
Playing scrabble with the litter – peep peep!
Spelling re-tilt and titler, scoring heaps – peep peep!
They scratch for cryptozoans – peep peep!
With an alternating skater’s sweep – peep peep!
Take an imaginary leap – peep peep!
See mini-subs in the deep – peep peep!
With their asdic going bleep – peep peep!
With heads cocked side to side – peep peep!
To calculate how steep – peep peep!
The angle of attack – peep peep!
On some unsuspecting worm – peep peep!
They pick pick peck in beat – peep peep!
With beacon flash of beak – peep peep!
I think they do it in their sleep – peep peep!
With sotto voce pip-squeak cheeps – peep peep!
Albatross
Hold CTRL and click here for Robert Burns' song: My Love is Like a Red Red Rose
http://www.chivalry.com/cantaria/sounds/red-red-rose.mp3
Albert Ross, royal albatross
To Molly Mork, his queen
Swore his marriage vow
To love her faithfully
Robbie Burns style
Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile
Of Antarctic seas between;
To love no other goonybird;
To come through rain and gale
American postal-service-wise
To deliver his male
To their annual tryst
On that sheer island stack.
They danced the flamingo flamenco
Clapping beaks like castanets,
Crackerjack snicker snack.
To pout and preen, bill and coo,
Their lifelong bond of love renew.
And Moll would lay their D.N.A.,
Their royal jewel, the sacred egg,
His sun within her moon.
Reverently they would brood
Each in his turn to shade
The ark of their covenant
From the rock-melting sun.
They fed and cherished
Their clumsy fledgling chick
Until its ugly duckling trick
When it swanned off to sea
With its cargo of their hopes.
One spring arrived the King
Gliding over the grey waves
To keep his rendezvous,
At the appointed place,
But no Moll came
Sweeping in from the cold sea.
He looked skyward in vain.
As days turned into weeks
In his anxious vigil
He grew gaunt and haggard
On the sun-melted rocks.
His beloved queen hung
Ancient-Mariner-wise
Crucified on the mast
Of a long-line fishing-boat,
Albatross on the cross.
Her princes of previous years
Were victims too,
Cruelly caught on barbed baits.
All love's labours lost
But still he waits
Looking to the empty sky
And still he loves her
Till all his seas gang dry.
Killing Roosters
We have three roosters in the yard -
Horatio and his well-grown sons.
All are as handsome as hussars
With golden epaulettes and spurs,
Green breeches taut stretched
Across their youthful thighs,
Plumed shako and martial cape
And arrogance of amber eyes.
The dowdy hens of the baggage train
Are down-trodden and abused.
The ladies of the regiment
Are delightfully amused,
But insolubly stuck for choice.
Which captain of dragoons to swoon
Over, which major of lancers
To dance the last quadrille,
Which ensign of lifeguards
To strut and swagger in the poultry yard.
My dears, this really will not do.
One cock is oodles for the likes of you.
And so with muffled drum, my son
And I, at dead of roosting night
Take the cockerels in their sleep
And strangle them without a peep.
For them no dashing gallantry,
No Austerlitz or Waterloo
As we twisted their fine necks askew
And watched them thrash their lives away.
When the candles guttered out
And the sky turned pink at rooster crow,
There was just the feathered finery –
The uniform of the gay hussars
Scattered on the field of Mars.
Sea Eagles and Skyscrapers
In Hong Kong the skyscrapers
Are the modern gods,
Great transformer toys of glass and steel,
That in the daytime sleep like trolls.
Hoary headed, lost in cloud thoughts,
They are the emergents
Of the concrete forest,
Shading the sub- canopy
Of apartment blocks.
Bromeliad antennae,
Receiving dishes like orchid flowers,
Strangling figs of cables –
Their lofty crowns
Are a perch for epiphytes.
The real sea-eagles from the China Sea
Are deceived and soar
In the thermals of their canyon walls,
To scan their trunks for nesting ledges.
At their feet,
Among the buttressed roots,
An army of leaf cutter ants,
Carrying cellphones, parcels,
Briefcases, laptops, umbrellas,
Scurry to the underground.
But at night
And in the misty twilight hours,
They open their eyes,
Strobe like luminescent kraken,
Firefly flash like pulsars
And talk across the bay
In a laser syntax light display.
Dead Sparrows
In the rosy pink and frosted dawn
I pick dead sparrows off the lawn.
God, who saw each feathered cherub fall,
Was no earthly use to them at all.
One not quite gone did shivering stand
Too weak to fly my human hand.
I’ll warm you ball of down a while
And ease your passing honeychil'.
For sparrow virtue no reward is sent.
For sparrow sin no punishment.
Acid rain falls on bad and good.
No shelter in this winter wood.
Disease won’t strike sniper bullet like,
Nor target each particular tyke.
More like random Columbine fun
From a maniac with a scattergun.
Huia
TerraNature | New Zealand Ecology - Huia
Who are ya, huia? Give us a clue,
As I pass in front of a glass front box
And stare up at your mate and you.
You were birds unique in size and shape of beak.
You with your stout and stabbing chisel.
Your mate with the curving tweezer tongs.
In fact to procure the grub you ate,
You and your dear dimorphic mate
Simply had to co-operate.
Were you the last pair shot for the pakeha
For gaudy plumes for ladies’ hats?
Or were you killed by feral cats?
Or was your death legitimised
By Maori customary rights.
I suppose it didn’t really matter
Who limed the branch or pulled the trigger.
You couldn’t give a feather whether
You adorned the Ariki of the Tuhoe clan
Or a milliner’s shop in Nottingham.
The following was one of the songs I wrote for a school musical - Tane Matua
The Song of The Kakapo
The Fabulous Kakapo Parrot
Down in the bush at night, we‘re feeling gloomy.
Cor blimey, strike a light, we‘re feeling glum.We are the kakapo,
Last of our race you know.
Boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom, b-o-o-o-o-m.
We scuttle on the ground. It‘s rather clumsy.
We cannot fly around, from tree to tree.
We‘ve lost our wings you see.
Some call it atrophy.
Boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom, b-o-o-o-o-m.
We‘re clad in gold and green. We‘re rather pretty.
Owl-parrots, we have seen much better days.
Pretty polly‘s getting old
Dressed in his green and gold.
Boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom, b-o-o-o-o-m.
We have a problem here. It‘s a sad story.
Our females disappeared long time ago.
If we can‘t find a hen,
What shall we turn to then?
Boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom, b-o-o-o-o-m.
Sing like a cockatoo, feel like a budgie.
Where will we get one though this time of night?
Less innuendo.
This is a family show.
Boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom, b-o-o-o-o-m.
We are the kakapo. We‘re feeling boomy.
Cor blimey, here we go, booming again.
We are the booming kind.
Watch out you don‘t go blind.
Boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom boom, boom-de-de-boom, b-o-o-o-o-m.
Lost Birds
Where are you birds of the bush?
You seem to be no more.
Stack a hayfield, lose a needle,
And it were quicker to find.
But who are you kidding, who cares?
All we see is a mummified carcase
Brought in by a logging crew;
A broken eggshell or two, easily
Overlooked; fossil droppings
On a rock; a creek eels no longer
Catch chicks in; few traces left
Where campers bivouac; walkers’
Last sighting years ago; cacophony
Of birdsong stilled. Where kauri grew,
Ruin now reigns. No single bird remains.
There are 14 extinct or threatened native New Zealand birds with Maori names Hidden in the above poem. For example more = moa. Can you find the other 13? In case you can’t here is the solution. Where are you birds of the bush Solution.doc
Chicken Soup
My grandfather, walrused like Hindenburg,
In corduroy pants held up with baling twine,
A grubby waistcoat to hold his fine cut shag.
He holds in his hands by their yellow legs
Two freshly killed Rhode Island hens.
Maybe in the trenches of the Somme
Where he was exposed to mustard gas,
He became inured to blood and guts and death.
Maybe for him killing chickens
Was done with easy nonchalance,
A mundane piece of husbandry.
When Marigold, our childhood pet,
Ceased to lay her daily chucky egg,
My father consigned her to the pot
With celery, carrots and brussels sprouts.
My mother clucked in sympathy.
My sister forswore chicken for life
And embarked for anorexia.
My father was exasperated,
Already angry with himself
At killing his favourite fowls.
I used to be the gentile goy-between
For my long time Jewish friend,
His persona-non-grata schickse wife,
And his vituperative old mother.
She was in pain from terminal cancer
And a survivor of the holocaust.
Bound by codes of hospitality,
She would offer me her kosher chicken soup
As she reviled her daughter-in-law
And her Gestapo torturers alike.
Her soup was a brew of bitter herbs.
Today I have held in my arms
Two worried, gently squawking hens,
Tansy, the cuckoo-barred Plymouth Rock
And Hyacinth, the silver Wyandotte.
I decapitated them
Because they laid only infrequent eggs
Yet ate the food of the other hens.
This cleansing was entirely rational,
A final solution to my chicken problem.
But I cannot feel dispassionate
And cry as I hold my avian friends
By their bloodstained yellow legs.
The Swift
That scythe the stratosphere.
A bird that sifts the sky plankton
Of errant midges, mayflies
And gossamer spiderlings.
Perhaps a bird so close to heaven
Arises Phoenix like from cuckoo-spit?
Perhaps two swifts in parenthesis
Consummate an ethereal love?
To a swift that flies so fast
All life on earth below is slow.
A whippet crawls, a cat leaps
And clutches thin air alone.
A human is as a tree or stone.
As a boy I watched the swifts
Make vapour trails, tracer tracks
And cloud chamber quark traces
Across the skylark meadow sky.
Vainly I aimed my pellet gun
In a vague up there somewhere way
And pulled the trigger carelessly
With not a prayer of hitting prey.
But I melted wax on Icarus wings,
Fairest Lucifer fell from grace.
Beauty, charm and strangeness
Extinguished in a final spark.
My innocence lay in tattered rags,
Broken struts and tangled wires.
Black scythe like wings across my heart,
Two broken birdmen on the charnel cart.
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