Immigrants

    We do not shoot the brides -
    although they are pests, and spread
    like puffs of ash
    across our village greens.

    Because they're not indigenous,
    we eat them, scraping
    their scrawn for the hooting pot.
    Mmm. Mmm. They're game.

    Red ones are bob apples,
    hopscotch, their saxophone tails
    chuckling us under the chin.
    Their nuts are proper

    like maids at maypole,
    or the bishop's churns,
    or the jangle of the testicles
    on ten morris men.

    This lot is foreign,
    skimping on our lingo,
    unChristian, weren't
    introduced until 1800. Bang.


From Robinson Crusoe's Bank Holiday Monday

Immigrants

On The Food And Drink Programme (Radio 4), during an item about unusual new game dishes, a hunter,
declining to shoot a pregnant grey squirrel, remarked
that grey squirrels were not indigenous, having only
been here since the start of the nineteenth century.