They Call It A Mall (Free Verse Sonnet) Poem by Gert Strydom

(after S. J. Pretorius)

They call it a mall
which is full of all sorts of chain stores,
that now stands right across the marsh
where I do miss all the many birds that had been there.
The butterfly fluttering has now also stopped,
all the black long-tail widow birds have disappeared
and people had build buildings of concrete right there,
with creeping-tractors that filled the marsh with rubble.
The weavers, the coots and the doves have disappeared into the nought,
while lorries t brought their loads through the day and night,
while scrapers wiped everything flat into the distance
and all the people are happy that do live nearby,
while the moorhens and stone-plovers stopped calling,
in the urbanization of the twenty first century.

[Reference:"Stadsuitbreiding by Crestasentrum" (City expansion at Cresta-centre)by S. J. Pretorius.]

© Gert Strydom