Flight from the colder clime

Flight from the colder clime; the sign of winter time,
Two or three geese, stragglers, add imperfection
To the machine of instinct, maybe older or not so fit,
They nevertheless, will reach their final destination,
Maybe the clay pond again; and at my foot like a sheet
Of cardboard, the flattened toad which could do as
A book mark for Nature’s book of Life and Death, though
The odds are the foot of a human inconsiderate to what
Is below, a giant juggernaut of will and desire, did by
Accident, one would hope, though it could have been
Willful, tread on the young toad newly emerged from
Tadpole, to expire in the act of the thoughtlessness.
Then later, the hooded crows on the traffic sign
Eye the fastfood wrapper, they too are addicted to salt
And sugar of the corporate shite, they too will return
And return, fight and bicker over a burger or the snicker
Bar half-chewed, maybe their iron constitutions will
Contain the toxic future, as rats, as cockroaches,
As humans – those apex trash eaters – full of plastic
And pollutants.
But then, I see a pair of magpies, a couple, who on the bank
Of another pond do seem in their wag of tail, glint of eye,
In their very ambit, to confirm some kind of embrace,
A courtship in continuum, they mirror I think the human
Race, at least in the outside motor of behaviour, their crow
Cousins in the air gambol in the semblance of friendship
Yet perhaps, it is for the best that here too one should apply
Morgan’s canon, will then keep all these beautiful animals
In mindless oblivion, to the terror of the dark side, as Johny
Cash sings, the beast in me, oh yes, the beast in the human.