the shooting

ok...i seem to have lost the urge to write about love and passion and pain, so where does that leave me...
a poet without anxt...

perhaps i could tell you about the brace of pheasant ... except a brace means two and there were actually five. five pheasants hanging from the plant holder hook by the back door. dead birds, very dead birds.

the neighbour had left them there, a gift, a sharing of the bountiful harvest of the shooting season. we are expected to eat these birds?

i may have been born, many, many long years ago on a dusty farm on top of a mountain in southern africa... but that was it ... i grew up in the towns and cities of the province formerly known as natal, now known by the much more romantic name... the kingdom of kwazulu or if one is trying really hard to be diplomatic kwazulu natal.

one buys meat from a butcher, it comes cleaned and sliced and diced... no way does it have a head and feathers. man, i purely lost my appetite.

the daughter-in-law is made of sterner stuff, she comes from a family of game rangers and hunters. "if you eat meat, you should be prepared to kill it and clean it!" yeah right... i dunno, suddenly vegetarianism is looking like an option for me.
daughter in law wrapped up warm, picked up the pheasants and headed off to the byre... where she plucked, cleaned and jointed said birds, producing...well...it looks just like bird from a butcher.

ah farm life, we now have a pile of highly prized scots pheasant in our freezer. will i partake of this delicacy? hell..i don't know, i saw those pheasants with their feathers on, they looked just like the kamikaze pheasants which so delight in leaping in front of my rav on missions suicidal.