Guinea Fowl
With a quail-shaped body
and a vulture-like head
they look like crossbred turkeys
or blue-ribbon hybrid hens.
Though in the kingdom of birds
this seemingly assorted
mixed bag is an independent flock
who, in slate-dark plumage
and moony-bright spots,
quills that a milliner would crave,
scratch around like Miss Marple,
stealthy as barnyard cats.
Nimble-footed in stifling
frocks, shrewd and antisocial,
they scour the land like ducks on water
but are nowhere near as quaint.
And they're far too busy
to swan about in a peacock suit
with the air of a lark ascending.
Theirs is the head down
hard-nosed blitz of unruly order,
driven as if by recompense or dutiful need.
In a gregarious grey-cloud tumbleweed
tight-knit pack, they’ve come to rid
the paddocks of seasonal peril:
locusts, spiders, ticks
and old, bald-faced misery.
Together they're in their element,
relentlessly rummaging,
constantly bending and pecking,
rooted to the spot at hand
in fastidious delight.
They do not care for the manacles
of a bygone world: kingdoms
of a fallen age, empires in the dust.
It's the sovereign dirt beneath their feet
and the babble of whistling chirps,
the workaday nod and lancing of beaks
that sets them apart from the hunt
in the grass.
As for the snake—
out from its pit of a hollowed log,
uncoiled as the rays of the sun,
needling through the underbrush
like a thick plait rivering in swards of green,
craving, I suppose, to slither head-on
into the banquet on the henhouse floor—
morning has lured it into the open,
freed it from the nocturnal swoop
of an owl and the hunt of a ravenous fox.
And as dawn unfurls in swathes
of random order, cold-blooded
with earthly hunger, the snake
slides-on, red tongue hissing,
a slick of fire across the feral sprawl.
Though in the eye of the guineas
it's merely a link in the chain of pests.
They'll spot one wriggling
in the burning distance or coldly
stalking under hot-flushed straw.
Then one by one they band together,
surround it in encircling ranks,
and with machinery screeches
they scourge in a cross-fire attack,
butchering it from head to tail
until the snake twitches
like a severed limb. And through
the punctured scales of its deathly skin,
in holes where there once were eyes,
they riddle it over with jackhammering pecks
leaving nothing more than a plaything,
bones for the driveling wind.
