Camouflage
Andrew Barton Paterson 1864 (Orange, New South Wales) – 1941 (Sydney, New South Wales)
Beside the bare and beaten track of travelling flocks and herds
The woodpecker went tapping on, the postman of the birds,
"I've got a letter here," he said, "that no one's understood,
Addressed as follows: 'To the bird that's like a piece of wood.'
"The soldier bird got very cross -- it wasn't meant for her;
The spurwing plover had a try to stab me with a spur:
The jackass laughed, and said the thing was written for a lark.
I think I'll chuck this postman job and take to stripping bark."
Then all the birds for miles around came in to lend a hand;
They perched upon a broken limb as thick as they could stand,
And just as old man eaglehawk prepared to have his say
A portion of the broken limb got up and flew away.
Then, casting grammar to the winds, the postman said, "That's him!
The boobook owl -- he squats himself along a broken limb,
And pokes his beak up like a stick; there's not a bird, I vow,
Can tell you which is boobook owl and which is broken bough.
"And that's the thing he calls his nest -- that jerry-built affair --
A bunch of sticks across a fork; I'll leave his letter there.
A cuckoo wouldn't use his nest, but what's the odds to him --
A bird that tries to imitate a piece of leaning limb!"
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:14 min read
- 79 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AABBCCDD EEFF GGHH IIGG |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic heptameter |
Characters | 1,226 |
Words | 242 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 4, 4, 4 |
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"Camouflage" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/2507/camouflage>.
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