This traveller friend of mine,

Does not feel the need a place to own.

Something inside tells this friend to rove,

Not even to stay, when besought, for one day more.

As per I, Once every year there is a day,

When I get the feel that my friend, with no delay,

Will be back from far away,

To this very place,

If I may add, just for a short stay.

The other day,

When I had felt that I did correctly read,

A new season has truly come indeed.

At dawn before the sun rose,

I went to the spot,

I always did at this time of the year,

A prominent rock amid the bushy reeds

And waited for the winged singers to arrive,

So as to listen to their chorus

And watch their acrobatic dances,

A gesture they always offer

For the arrival of a spring season -

That would sprig out victoriously

Against the odds,

Winter had posed on the transition road.

Long I stood,

As much as I could,

For I had been disinclined to admit,

That winter in fact has refused to retreat,

Despite the trounced defeat.

It had looked,

Winter had obdurately continued to pose a threat

Repeat after repeat.

Then came dusk,

And the last image of the Sun,

Beyond the horizon it sunk.

Still the singers did not come.

I had taken no breakfast,

Nor did I anything when the

Day came to last.

Doleful, though you may say,

That I had wasted a whole day,

I went to bed and lay,

Hopeful, as I could be,

I prayed that in the providence of the Lord,

That I would continue to have had a trust

That when another dawn do burst

The singers may come at last.

Well, dawns had come and gone,

And I still had stood

This time round, I had hoped they come,

And would change my melancholic mood.

Then I heard, though be it faint, the much waited song

From a distance long,

And finally my sight saw

The elegant aerodynamics svelte

Swooping down like a jet

To the very spot they habitually belonged.

Delight as I was, however, I noticed,

There was something ominously wrong.

His feather was raffled and flogged

And with the sleight of the wings

He did manage to land, all right, on a log,

But it did so only with one leg.

And the female, once he shared

His life in marriage,

Was not in sight within the visible range.

My euphoric delight,

Upon his arrival that I exhibited,

Quickly, as it did come, now found exited.

She has been shot down!

By gun toting stinking damn low mean,

Who on earth, drives pleasure,

seeing others creature gasping in seizure,

Until its life is brought untimely to tragic closure?

The excuses that I have heard,

That birds flocking in herds

Are menace and pirates in the air?

Anything but sympathy is what they do deserve.

But pardon me! I vehemently disagree.

If we are to welcome a change of seasons,

Then it stands to reason,

In this planet

We are not the only citizens.

That we have to accept,

Everything that comes with it.

Who are they?

Who are you?

And who am I to say,

That birds do not farm and fertilise,

They’re own crops to utilise?

They plough and nourish the earth,

As much as they take from its breast.

Who am I to say,

Birds are pests,

Who prey on someone’s harvest,

And unlawfully strew their nests?

Birds flock up and own the glob,

Not in search of land to grab,

And drub it with barbed wire and mortars,

At the expense of scrubs.

Up and down the glob,

Birds flock,

Dictated by the seasonal clock,

In time honoured fashion,

With perennial passion,

And military style drilling precision-

But unlike military with neither tension nor aggression.

In a circle, they flock,

And they in fact are the clocks,

Seasons can be understood and unlocked.

Copyright Haileselassie Giramy

19/3/98