When Galahs show the way

When galahs show the way

Braking at yet another red light

The pressure under foot echoes dense anxiety in belly and in heart:

Running late.

But there, a row of galahs on the light pole

Lined up on the horizontal beam

Dozens of them; but they don’t quite fit

And one is relegated to the descending curve,

Slides and must take wing, flies around and wedges into the row;

Birds adjusting, and the one now on the end, sliding, taking wing,

Flying around, edging into the row;

And another slides off the end, and so it goes.

Cocooned I cannot hear their calls

The screeching chatter I know must be there.

But I am captivated and my belly laughs,

The dense knot releases, the light turns green and soon I arrive,

Heart full of joy, present and not late.

Tina Shettigara © 2016

This light pole is not even remotely like the one in the poem and there were way more galahs. Credit: https://hiveminer.com/Tags/galah%2Cgalahs where you will see many more galah pictures.

It was a pole like this,
let your imagination do the rest

I was driving past the actual location and saw these galahs on a nearby pole, so stopped to take their photo.
They waited just long enough for one snap. Taken with my smart phone.