Member-only story
A Long Tail
It was a snake.
There’s no misspelling as I’ll be telling,
A tale about a very long tail,
The tail belonged to a long carpet snake,
Who fed on our young chicks without fail.
We lived on a farm and small chicks came to harm,
From a rapacious long slithering snake,
So, I constructed a cage of chicken wire,
To keep the chickens safe from this Joe Blake.
Being a sage, I housed the cage,
Under our high-set Queensland house,
Directly below our bedroom,
Where we could hear a squeak from a mouse.
In the dead of the night the chickens took fright,
And squawked and woke us from our sleep,
And in night attire we sped like wildfire,
To find what caused the wee chicks to cheep, cheep.
My wife held a hurricane lantern,
Enough lustre to light up the scene,
And see that the snakes head had burrowed under the cage,
To eat chicks for his nightly protein.
