Wordbirds, 7

This new series--"Wordbirds"--arises from a journey I will take through my Webster's 3rd Dictionary. What I will do: I'll look on the first page for each letter, and the first word that flies up at me (because I don't know it, because I just think it's interesting, etc.) becomes the subject for that day's doggerel. I will move through letter z, then work my way back again, the second time using the last page of each letter's section of Webster's. Let's see what happens ...

Words that flew into my life from Webster’s 3^rd …

Gabriel ratchet: noun 

the cries of migrating wild geese flying by night which are often popularly explained as the baying of a supernatural pack of hounds and to which various superstitious significances (as forebodings of evil) are attributed

Middle English Gabrielle rache, from Gabriel, one of the seven archangels, the herald of good tidings (Luke 1), thought of as blowing a trumpet on Judgment Day + rache hound 

Oh, yes, all that he heard in the darkest of night

Was the sound in the sky—and it didn’t sound right.

“It’s just geese,” said his wife, who was always so calm.

“Not it ain’t!” he declared. “It’s a drone with a bomb!”

Then his wife only yawned, and she turned in her bed,

While her husband lay frightened with dread in his head.

And when morning arrived, she awoke—he was gone!

And a cop then informed her, “He’s out on the lawn,

Where’s he’s totally naked—from head to his butt.”

And she said, “Yes, I guess—he’s a very cracked nut.”

So the moral is simple: For marital peace,

You must simply ignore all the honking of geese!