The Cuckoo sings as bright as any bird

and its forest chattering drawl

draws many mouths to smile

as the long awaited Spring peeks its head

from around Winter’s closely gathered shawl.

 

The odious nature of its parenting skills make the Cockroach

shiver with nerves pumping prehistoric blood

and alien indestructibility. It shakes its scale like protrusion

and it sniffs loudly and the Cuckoo hears from above the trees

soaring in search of a sucker to warm its eggs.

 

The marble eggs carefully laid by the sparrow, destroyed, turned over, damaged

and pecked to bits, the chattering of the cuckoo disguising

the soft shells cracking keenly, swiftly and without mercy, for there is no

time like the present for the Cuckoo in which to lay her own little tufted

parasite in somebody else’s nest.

 

The Cockroach sniffs the ground in search of the muck that was raked

and wishes it were a Scorpion, bitter, twisted but

respected by those who wish to see the Cockroach destroyed

for the vermin it is, the ticking of its body and the exposing

of light upon its nocturnal frame, the Scorpion at least stings back.

 

The odour of the Cockroach, unable to have be nagged at by its

equally disgusting wife, as it sits in the dark and digests

bile and human scorn ,doesn’t reach the branches

in which the Cuckoo lays in silent wait, the first hijack of Spring,

but far above the waiting Cuckoo, flies a parasite, a killer of hearts.

 

The parasitic wasp, the one whose young, the grub scrounging

like, sponging and freeloading black hearted venomous killers,

that devours its host from the inside out till

the husk of something that was pure

now becomes a teeming, writhing mass of putrid, cobwebbed, slithering mess.

 

Parasites all, all with spawn regurgitating a future in which

their hosts become sick, wither and die, like a corpse left to rot

in the forest glade and where nightshade poisons the tenderness

of plants and could be mighty Oaks and sleeping Willows,

all are nothing compared to the Spore, lurking in the brains of all three.

 

The spore will attack, will convince a hard-working and industrious ant

to commit suicide by leaping into the unknown,

past the Cuckoo, proud that it does nothing to aid its children,

down past the parasite wasp, whose offspring ravage and tear

and down to the awaiting, jaw slapping, ticking Cockroach.

 

All are doomed in the wake of the spore, they just don’t realise

that they are dead, the parasite to end them all

serves notice and awaits to conquer

by stealth, if it possessed hands, it would ring them in mock weakness

and defy them to prove otherwise.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015