Tree Frog - Costa Rica

Its ocean swaying

High in  the misty forest

The world in a leaf

Toads are poisonous

Warty, squat, prone to orgies

Dry-skinned secretive

Insectivorous frogs

With a little less elegance -

Don't become princes. 

Tsetse Fly

This most mighty fly

Drew a line across Africa

Beyond which no Whites

Pushing  wagons North

With their exotic cattle

Could conquer, survive

Each  baby bloodsucker

Born live, a single darling

Deadly pride and joy

Emperor Scorpion

Terrifying?

In its world a predator 

To be reckoned with

It protects live young

Ancient, glows blue in UV light

Dances the night away

Luna Moth

By the time she's born

Much of life's fuss is over:

A paramount job 

Remains. Glorious

She rises, settles to lay her eggs,

Fasts for ten days, dies.  

Stag Beetles

Stag beetles jousting:

Enlarged to the human scale

Arthurian phantasms

Evolved for battle:

The romance of derring-do

Evolved, incarnate

Damselflies

Oh! the amazing

Impossibly long fuselages

Powering wings so delicafe, so perfected!

The profligate diversity, the careless rapture!

Can we still find across the world

The common blue, the narrow-winged,

And yes, the "Beautiful Demoiselle",

The Banded, the Broadwinged, the Spreadwinged

The Siberian Winter (Yes! again)

The Pond, the White-legged,

Hundreds more, finely distinguished

And into the thickets of Latin and Greek,

The Lestordeidae, the Pseudostigmata

The Deradatta the Diphlebia

The Epallage, the Jumix

The :Palademnerna Chriquita?

The grudging counters, overachieving  taxonomists

Pronounce the verdict:  2942 species

And I assert the freedom to quibble

To fervently believe that out there in the swamps

All the outlands, wetlandish realms of Gaia

The 2943rd and all its cousins

Are fluttering and settling

In the fair country beyond death 

And all the dwindling,

The diminishment of all our lives.

Barred Owls Calling

Now, young raised and flown  

Neighbours tell faithful spouses

True states of affairs

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