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 partner’s 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 ya mad galah!”

I didn’t fly I’d just about

Got that delicious seed dug out.

My fiends 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 and flattened toad,

And there’s a mangled kangaroo

A victim of the highway too,

A blue tongue lizard thought it great

To lie and thermoregulate

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 bright headlights

Or hop across the road at nights

Or lie there baking in the sun

Or run across the road for fun

Or eat the grass along the side

Just think of all of us who’ve died.

 

 

© David McK. Berman 1984

 

 

 

 

 

Galah

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“Get off the road ya mad galah!!!!”