Chooks

Two small hens peck quietly in the corner, content with dust and grain. Above them the flock erupts into crowing beaks and blazing combs, feathers flaring like flame, eggs scattered like small pale moons. Behind every one of them stands a jungle fowl, and behind that the shadow of something older and fiercer that once walked the earth on clawed feet. They wake the world each morning, they woke a farmhouse in Waihī, and they’ve fed us every day since we first let them in. There were many, nameless.