Beaver Geezers
Beavers are thievers,
By stealing the gravity
Out of the water –
Such utter depravity !
Beavers are stemming our streams
With their half-inched beams,
And leaving them pooling around.
And now I hear beavers
Are back in this manor,
Those peevers and planners
Are channelling London Town.
I see their toothmarks
Graffiti the tree barks
Up to their old larks,
Of gumming the plumbing –
Their home is a slum
Full of mildew and scum,
And whenever they come
They leave the bath running.
Beavers are weavers,
When heaving their timbers,
When lugging their tinder for cleaving together.
You just won’t believe
All the leaves they retrieve
For their bodge for a lodge
And their damnable dam.
These immigrant skeevers
Are tree-rustling reavers –
Who knocked-up a hodgepodge
Wherever they swam.
We end up with either
The swamp in a fever,
Or banks in a stodge
And the brook in a jam.
But now that they’re Cockneys,
And vegan beefeaters –
These beavers won’t shock me a smidge.
So change-up the meter, and take to the bridge –
They’re teeming in the borough, good and thorough,
Down the Central Line,
Grinning with their teeth on Hampstead Heath,
And in the Serpentine.
It won’t be very long
And they’ll be seven thousand strong,
With their ev’ry one a carrier
Of oak and London plain.
They’ll get their sapling shredding done
From Wapping up to Teddington,
By blocking Woolwich Barrier
And flooding Pudding Lane.
Beavers are thievers,
And duckers and divers,
And cunning deceivers,
And wetback survivors –
They’re just like the rest of us,
London domesticus,
Hard-working strivers,
And over-achievers.
And soon they’ll fit right in, I’m sure,
In the melting pot of the pond next door.
The real question, of course, is how do beavers colonise new rivers well away from the old ones? Some say they can travel over land for many miles, but we all know the truth – they’re carried there by red kites !