This piece was written for D’Verse’s challenge this week to demonstrate turns in poetry – where a poem shifts gear or opens a window.

At her birth

she staggered on unfamiliar legs

while her mother licked her clean

and tried not to stand on her in forgetfulness

or fatigue.

Soon she stood alone,

with a coat that waxed in spring

and waned in winter moon.

At the yearling sale she pranced,

nostrils flared,

unminded of her fetlocks

in the racing years.

In time, she ran her maiden,

romance in full stride when,

shifting in the running,

her stablemate grabbed the inside rail.

She took off in pursuit.

(Nothing cuts like an odds-fed whip

a furlong out from home.)

And then, snap!

“History”, her verdict went

and the vets screened the final shot.

Her blood soaked into the track

and into the knacker’s van

and she was gone.

This is my response to the D’Verse poetry challenge around paradox.

I am the mother of deserved sorrows

I am the ender of the grief.

I am violator of the rapists

I am the robber of the thief.

I am killer of the killers,

I am the harbinger of fate.

I am the slayer of the ‘innocent’

that breached the children’s gate.

I am the puncher of the punchers

that break a woman’s face.

I am the Lord High re-positioner

that puts them in their place.

I am the fleecer of the businesses

that live by telling lies.

I leave their empty bank accounts

to the mercy of the flies.

I am the new messiah

that brings preachers to their knees

and opens up their honeypots

to the faithful’s bees.

I am the paradox of virtue

wrapped in the cloak of vice.

The warm blood of the evil

no match for veins of ice.

I’m pleased to reblog this superb piece by Chel Owens. Tell Me the Story, Daddy. | Chel Owens

This preposterous piece of poetic puerility was written for the divine Ms. Owen’s ‘A Mused Poetry’ prompt for this week: ‘Snarky Rant. That’s right: a jaded, sarcastic, fed up, perhaps even nihilistic poem in an “I stick it to you, sucky events!” manner.‘ I’ll thank Charles Dodgson for the inspiration when next I see him.

The time has come, so all us said,

to not talk of many things:

of twits and tweets to ‘mind your beeswax’

of savages and would-be kings

of whether votes are fixed or not

and whether pigs have wings.

Be gone, your wretched plague talk

of drinking Kool-Aid with your bleach

of bingeing booze and Netflix

of not going to the beach

of ‘who is that masked stranger?’

No more, I do beseech!

Let’s rid ourselves of poverty

Of coherent speech and word

Spike the ‘like’ and ‘whatever’

Treat WTF as if a steaming t**d

Let’s have a pedant as a President,

a VP proud to be a nerd.

Fie upon the boomer bashers

Flinging our legacy askew

Blaming us for every ill

From planet to housing queue

End their blameless sanctimony;

Vegans, anyone, on the barbecue?

Our village is currently besieged by an invasion of Little Corellas. (They are hardly little but they are smaller than their close relatives, cockatoos and galahs.) I exaggerate not when I say they number in the hundreds. They can strip a tree of its leaves or denude a sports ground in no time. Originally a desert bird, as a result of droughts, loss of habitat and making connections with liberated caged birds, they have migrated to cereal farms, cities and the coast for their rich pickings.

Glorying in birds is in the DNA of the denizens of Chez Jacquier and we understand the environmental payback at work here. However their unrelenting high-pitched screeching from early morning until late at night has slipped into the realms of cruel and unusual punishment. If Hitchcock had used them in The Birds, audiences would have run screaming into the street before the end of the first reel.

Well, just move them on, I barely hear you cry above the cacophony. Unfortunately every community in Australia has tried that, with little success beyond the immediate term. Corellas are highly intelligent and have a very sophisticated communication system, so they quickly realise that whatever noise you create or visual deterrent you manufacture it is entirely harmless and can be routinely ignored. Drones have been tried but they are too smart for them. Ultimately, limited culling (i.e. blasting the little buggers with shotguns) becomes part of the strategy but again has little long-term effect and is of limited value in towns and suburbs for safety reasons. (Indeed, they have been seen to immediately roost on suburban roofs at the first shot.)

In fairness (not that they deserve that level of consideration), they are yet to attack our garden or our trees (unlike the wantonly destructive galahs) and we only pounce when they start to ground feed on our peripheries. Up until now, vigorous bashing together of baking trays and wading into the flock accords us some relief close to home. However the chorus from hell from the middle distance ruins any hope of a peaceful sojourn outdoors in the early mornings and evenings, which is, after all, one of the great rewards for diligent gardeners.

I am reliably informed that they will move on at the end of March, which is about as comforting as being told that’s when your jailer will cease to suspend you by your ankles. Until then, it is difficult not to contemplate how a certain virus that’s doing the rounds might be introduced to their number. Corella-19 may be just the thing we need to deal with those flocking corellas.