Tuesday Poem - Ten Things I Want To Tell You About My Ducks by Laurice Gilbert

Ten Things I Want To Tell You About My Ducks

1. They are Khaki Campbells, but they are not khaki. They are assorted ratios of brown and white, though they have khaki beaks and feet.
2. They are all girls, including the transgender one who looks and sounds like a drake. They need a guard while they eat, and she drew the short straw.
3. Their eggs are exactly like chook eggs, only bigger. Get over it. The eggs are especially good for baking because of their greater loft.
4. They hide their eggs under leaf litter or on straw that I leave out in the hedge or beneath flax bushes or behind the incinerator…
5. … except for Lucy, who lays hers wherever she happens to be at the time the need overcomes her. Lucy has orange feet.
   
6. Sometimes they lay their eggs in the sunken bath in the lawn that is their pond, for us to find when we change the water. These are inedible.
7. I suspect the pond eggs are Lucy’s.
8. They do not eat bread but Hi-Lay Chicken Pellets, whole dried corn and wheat. They love lettuce. Lettuces are very expensive in winter.
9. The checkout operator at Pak’n Save asks me if we will eat them when they stop laying eggs.
10. No.

This super poem was awarded second prize in the Caselberg International Poetry Competition, 2013 and was published in Landfall, May 2013.

Laurice Gilbert lives in Wellington, New Zealand and is a very busy poetry person, what with doing her own work plus soldiering on as President and national Coordinator of the New Zealand Poetry Society. The monthly reading she curates at the Historic Thistle Inn is a must if you are in town.

http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/aboutaboutus

Below is a link to Laurice's book – My Family & Other Strangers.

http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/myfamilyotherstrangers

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