ODE TO THE SONGBIRDS OF THE GARDEN

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In thanksgiving for their symphony all summer long;

I hoisted a birdfeeder on my balcony;

For those mirthful minstrels who filled my summer air with song.

The preening fashionista of my feeder is the finch;

Who with chirping chime and twittering delight

Comes in eloquent splendour his prandium to pinch,

To my perch, in green and gold and kaleidoscopic colours to alight.

My generosity is now hideously displaced;

As the boughs heavy with their fruit they weep and hang;

But my friends who from the undergrowth come with golden glittering flittering haste;

By crow and magpie rooks and vagabond; scavengers who neither charmed nor ever sang

Yes that hooded slate eyed crow perches from a nearby tree, and peers out;

And now like Leda he takes the feeder and ravishes its peanut flesh;

With a beak of anvil black; he twists and turns his raped victim as he ravishes himself about;

While my perky thrifty songbirds take the seed he spills grotesquely from the mesh.

And of a sudden the charming songsters are scattered by the Rook’s raucous and thunderous plunder,

And left to crawl and peck the falling crumbs from the table, under

Reign unchallenged over all the dispossessed and smaller creatures of flight

But observing them, a method I contrived.

To spare the feed for the chirpy charmers from the hedge

By elongating the suspended loop, I’ve devised.

And thwarted the scavengers from gaining purchase on theLedge ,

And for three days now the crows have taken flight;

They scowl in a vengeful huddle in the trees in congress conspiring;

All the while keeping the merry feasting songbirds in their wrathful sight;