The Dead Galah

Galah


I was a little pink Galah
Just sitting on the highway tar.
Just sitting, eating on the road
Wheat that spilt from someone’s load.
Fighting for the finest seed
Disgusted with my parents greed,
Then flying high to miss the cars
Which often flatten slow galahs.
Then landing on the road once more,
To get the wheat we’d missed before.

Just then I found a lovely grain
It made the other wheat look plain.
It was big and rounded but
It had fallen in a rut.
My friends were squawking, “There’s a car,
Get off the road you mad galah!”
I didn’t fly I’d just about
Got that delicious seed dug out
My friends were making quite a fuss
Squawking that “the car’s a bus!”

I got the seed an’ flew but splat
And now I’m feeling rather flat,
A very sore and sorry bird.
The driver hadn’t even heard
And here I am stuck on the grill
Feeling quite a dopey dill,
But not everyone can poach
A ride upon a tourist coach
And as I drive about today
I see the world a different way.

Life’s not only piles of grain
Sprinkled there like golden rain.
There’s other things along the road,
A dead wombat, a flattened toad,
And there’s a mangled kangaroo
A victim of the highway too,
A blue tongue lizard though it great
To lie and thermo regulate
In the middle of the road
But he’s squashed there like the toad.

The wombat with his tiny stride
Ran but found the road too wide,
The roo had some grass to munch,
Saw the lights and hopped then crunch.
Now eating them are hawks and crows,
There’s never any dead of those
And up here on the grill with me
There’s moths, grasshoppers and a bee,
A butterfly, a dragon fly,
The highway caused them all to die.

So all of you who use the road,
Drive a car or spill a load,
Or fly towards the bright headlight
Or hop across the road at night
Or lie there baking in the sun
Or run across the road for fun
Or eat grass along the side
Just think of all of us who ’ve died.

© David McK. Berman 1984

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

Umm, that's not your happy song, is it?

You had to be there, Ashke. Eating ice cream in the sunset on the banks of the banks of the mighty Speed River, relaxing on my own after a long day with the kids, listening to the local storytellers' guild. Brian has this lovely baritone voice and Aussie accent. He described the bird first, and why the phrase "you mad galah" is apt, and the thought of this bird observing his greedy relatives and then driving along the highway on his grand adventure, not realizing dead birds don't speak, let alone write poetry, was the perfect end to the day.

Lyon! Archie? Share! Share!

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

I want `Metabiel dances with Boreas`, now.

I guess so! To each their own. My daughter's happy music is Alice Cooper.