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Poem: Country Skies

The bustling “avian highway” provides inspiration for this week’s poem from Fleurieu Peninsula contributor Melanie Rees.

Country Skies

Country skies bustle like a city
street. Without road rules.
Without traffic lights. Morning congestion
starts at dawn. Galahs dart and dive
like dodgem cars, hooning
along the streets, swerving
between traffic, tempting fate like reckless
teens, proud of their new P-plates.
Ravens in black leathers stand
like gangsters ready for the gang war
with marauding magpies, parked
on the fences below.
Sergeant wattle bird, flashes
Red as bright as a police beacon
and disbands the fray.
The yellow-tailed black cockatoo strolls
as leisurely as a Porsche with screeching
engine that needs tuning.
Mrs willie wagtail flashes
and wiggles her posterior
like a stripper hailing down cars.
Hundreds of corellas perch on an Aleppo pine
like Christmas lights, white and bright
against the darkening skies.
And above all soars the peregrine falcon.
She plummets like a racing car. Crash
seems imminent until she skids
to a halt and flies back
to the bustle and commotion,
of the avian highway.

Melanie Rees grew up on a farm in the eastern Hills and Murray Plains Catchment Area, and now lives on the Fleurieu Peninsula. She runs her own environmental consultancy business, writes fiction and poetry, and is currently studying Professional Writing at the Adelaide College of the Arts. She has a literary blog at www.flexirees.wordpress.com.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.

 

 

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