Life choice
I’m so excited, she says. On Saturday
my family – mother, brother and five cats
at the last count – will increase by three.
This calls, I say, for a party, with
advocaat cocktails and dancing the foxtrot.
But it seems an early night’s in order,
the expected guests being as good as
legless and somewhat challenged
in the plumage department.
She’s put up perches and a run for later;
right now the new arrivals will be
little more than squatters
after a twelve-month squash behind bars,
sentenced to lay without remission
on a sheet of A4.
Now they’re to have another stab
at living, saved from a short-term future
in breadcrumbs or sauce chasseur.
But how, I wonder, will she
pick them out from the other
nineteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven?