Percy was a platypus who lived in New South Wales

his water hole was getting bloody shallow,

the tiny fish were gone and he was running low on snails,

and all the water weed was turning yellow.

The river hadn't run now for a dozen years or more,

the biggest dry in all of Aussie history,

he wondered why it didn't rain - it always had before,

To Percy it was something of a mystery.

He thought back to the Fifties when his world was green and brown,

enough to share for farmers and for creatures,

but then the banks took over and insisted trees come down,

no profit margin found in shady features.

The trees were cut, the paddocks sown, and crops rose in the air,

the money train was rolling, how terrific,

the dozers rolled as well and turned the whole damn country bare,

a farmland from Atlantic to Pacific.

Now Percy knew a country needs its farms and crops and seeds,

and cities, roads and homes of bricks and mortar,

but one thing over all is something everybody needs:

it's rain - a country has to have its water!

He lay there thinking, in the mud, his billabong was dried,

the time was at an end for poor old Percy,

he looked up at the boiling sun, and slowly baked and died,

the bush without its rain will show no mercy.

I'll write poor Percy's epitaph, for all the world to read:

"A miracle of Earthly evolution -

Destroyed by Nature's Nemesis: The World's relentless greed,

and Man's continued penchant for pollution."

 More of my Environment Poems HERE

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