145.Snowfleas146 Jumping spider - Maevia Inclemens
147 Vicuna
148. Bee Hummingbird (For Esther)
149.Leopard Seal
150. Screech Owls
151 Golden Eagles, Isle of Mull, Scotland
152. Dung Beetle
153. Bactrian Camel
154. Rats Transfiguring
155. Marsh Treader
156. Piculets
157. Vine Snake
159, Skinks
160. Tamarin
161. Okapi, Pygmy Hippopotamus
162.Ostrich
163. African Lion
164. Arg.entine Ants.
165. House Mouse
166. Fireflies
1. Black Bear
Black bear grumbling along
Ancient trails through the woods
Denned tight all winter
2.
Yak
Yak wisdom says
Wander over high passes
Find the sweetest grass
3.
Cat
Fastidious cat!
Every exploration
A predator's move
4.
Musk Ox
Circle round the young:
Shelter them from wolves, weather,
Stand close, face winds, endure.
5.
Snow Leopard
Fabulous recluse:
Only the higher mountains
Offer space, sanctuary:
6.
Polar Bear
Find the breathing hole
Cover your nose. Be still. Wait.
When time expires, strike.
7.
Octopus
Don't even begin
To think you know anything:
My world is complex.
8.
Mosquito
Ah! The sweetest smell
Leads me to delicious blood
Under porous skin.
9.
Coyote
Alongside humans
My own business can flourish -
I map our shared world.
10.
Crocodile
On the river bank
You'd think I sleep forever -
Oh, just come closer !
11.
Tree Viper
I see infra red
I have a motion sensor
Beyond your feebleness
12.
Tree Frog
In my private sea
You observe my beating heart
My soul invisible
13.
Great Grey Owl
A tower of feathers
Silent watch in winter trees
Tundra spread below
14.
Chipmunk
Here and there there there
An endless race against death -
Dash back to safety.
15.
Grey Squirrel
They call us tree rats
But we lead parallel lives
In pure elegance
16.
Sea Otter
Lie back little one
Hold it tight between your paws
Crack it with a stone
17.
Bandicoot
Bandicoots at night
Are loners against the world
Grumpy little souls
18.
Lynx
I sacrifice grace
A little, to heft, a little
But stay predator
19.
Cat
Infinitesimal
Are the differences, the chasm
Between cat species
20.
Virus
My name is virus
I seek bacteria
To eat, multiply
Deep in the darkness
Endless tunnels of your blood
We billions unseen
21.
Water snake swimming, Bearcamp Pond, Tamworth
Undulating grace:
Its calligraphy describes
Fluid arcs of purpose
22.
Emperor Penguins
Hauled by instinct to account
Willed from the restless seas
Their paradise of grace
Trudging Inland
The journey blind, unerring
To this exact place
In darkness they stand
Cold and wind that freeze the spirit
New life balanced on their feet
Held in the savage clasp
Of two months starvation
They dream eternity
There’s no way out
Death’s suspended option
Premeditated
The eggs contain
The precious promise
That life conquers all
Even in night’s dominion
23.
Monarch (from the prose of Diane Ackerman)
Silent beautiful fragile
Harmless determined clean graceful
Ingenious chemists symbol of innocence
Like the imagination
They dart from one sunlit spot to another
24. Bats in Costa Rica
In the roof they hang Little packets of darkness Waiting for the night |
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25. |
Box Turtle
Plodding the millennia
Outlasting the forests
Its sun-driven blood
Patrols the inner labyrinth
Its safety itself
Each year a jaunty spring excursion
Ends in winter burial
26.
Worm
Burrowing in your allotted patch youmove through the dark, muscles contracting one by onein every part, lengthening and shorteningthe slick segmented tube of you, furrows in your wake.
Devising passages for water, air,
you plot the gaps that keep the structure from collapse.Dead things you know. Plants and creatures both.Your grooves shift matter, sifting as you go.
Eyeless, your appetite aerates.
Eating the world, you open it.
You ingest to differentiate.
Under the foot-stamped earth, you eat into a clot\of leaf mould, clay and mildew, and express what you canpart with, as self-possessed as when you started.
Your secretions bind the soil,
your shit enriches it. How things lienow will be undone, will reoccur. You, a surface-level archivist
sensing all there is
can be gone through. The body borne
within its plot.
Gail McConnell
27,
Giraffe
Once upon a time
In a land of trees and grass
They stood above the fray
And browsed the sky
Evolved to reach the highest
Became the long-necked giants
Silent slow motion
The towering legs carry them
From once upon to now
28.
The Plains-Wanderer
Unassuming, earthbound
On the cusp of flightlessness
I am overlooked
But here in the grass
Scratching for a bare living
I shine in glory
29.
Giant Anteater
For the world of ants
He is the unthinkable
Destroying angel
At his own scale
A comic, vulnerable
Grotesque niche-dweller
For himself, his ilk
His daily path before him
An artisan’s life
30.
Crested Porcupine
Rattling her stockade
Her slow obstinate saunter
Homebound, defiant
31.
Black-and-White Warbler
Among the brilliance
Of my cousins I am quiet,
A flow of shadows
My plumage the hatching
Of the slanting forest light
Cracking the silence
32.
Slimy Salamander
Breathing through its skin
It basks in watery air
In its dank, dark world
It surprises us:
Behaves above its image
Faithfully guards its egg
33.
Gold Frog
Worth its weight in gold:
Its life half-buried treasure
Living forest floor
A shielded sovereign:
No suit of armour, more a door
Seals its hiding place
34.
Wallace’s Flying Frog
Nature has performed
Some precise calculations:
Surface area to weight
Flippers for gliding
Making its own tadpole pond
Just another attribute
35.
Midwife Toad
My reward my genes
In a sticky string of eggs
Tied around my legs
Drag them to water
Heavy chains of fatherhood
Days and nights of love
36.
Tasmanian Devil
The devil we know
Has lost its wolf provider
Taken to hunting
Crunching carcasses
With massive jaws just a part
Of the whole story
Mummies have pouches
For months of baby safety
Half a year’s love milk
37.
On The Edge - The Tamarins, Emperor, and Golden Lion
Their long tails flowing
Parabolas their paths of air
Stitching earth to sky
In the sweeping world
The trees on the edge of death
As if immortal
Eye to eye and face
To face the tamarins meet
The aspect of eternity
38.
Iguana
When we retire, in a year or two, we’re going
to live on a smallholding in a warm climate -
New Zealand, or the south of France,
or it might have to be Essex - somewhere
drier than here, because of my arthritis,
out in the country but near a hospital,
with shops, a good library, easy access
to cultural venues, and we’ll grow our own
vegetables and get on with the neighbours,
eat breakfast and lunch and dinner
outside in the garden. Perhaps we’ll get
a boy in to help, if Richard’s knee gets
any worse. There’ll be no more depression
from me, no more illness, I’ll have been
going to the gym by then and have lost
a few stone and be able to move more easily.
And we are going to have two collie dogs
and two cats (we have the cats already)
and a parrot in another part of the house,
and an iguana.
That’s the only thing that worries me.
The iguana.
Do they get on with dogs and cats?
We’ll have a conservatory, I forgot that,
so perhaps the iguana could live in there.
No, the cats would always be in there,
because of the sun and the warmth.
Would we have to keep it in a cage?
Or would it roam freely through the house,
come slithering into bed unannounced,
in the middle of the night, as Smokey does,
and would it feel warm and cuddly,
or cold and scaly, and scrape my shins?
(I have to be careful of my shins.)
Or am I thinking of an armadillo?
And what do they eat? Would it eat
mice, dogfood, leaves? Would we keep
losing it as it darted behind wardrobes,
or would it live in the airing cupboard?
And if we went away, would a cat, dog,
and parrot sitter be prepared for an iguana?
Wouldn’t he draw the line at an iguana?
Shouldn’t I draw the line at an iguana?
Rosemary Mcleish
39.
Old Buffalo
Old Buffalo wakes up in the morning,
creaks to his arthritic knees, groans as he
lumbers to his feet, looks about him,
dopey with sleep, confused. Where is he?
Instead of the herd, he sees a long string
of something he doesn’t know how to
think about: horses, he knows them
from the past, and those strange creatures
which stand up on their hind legs and
make a lot of noise, he’s seen them before.
But what are those huge lumbering things,
moving head to tail across the prairie?
Time was, when his eyes were still good,
he could look across the world and all
he would see was food, mile upon mile
of delicious food, swaying in the breeze,
glinting in the sun. But now everything
is changing, he doesn't understand the
barren patches, and where is the herd?
There used to be buffalo everywhere,
eating, and when he was king, cows
for the taking, sons and battles and glory.
Now he sees the last of them, so few,
moving away in the distance, leaving him,
the sign that his time has come. Behind
his back in the night he’s been ousted.
He bellows and stamps but he’s tired,
he’s finished. They don’t look round.
He thinks he’ll go to the buffalo jump,
take the hero’s last leap, but on the way
death comes to meet him, in the guise of
a greedy little man on a pony with a rifle,
who has no use after all for the worthless hide,
the mangy hump, or the withered old balls.
Rosemary Mcleish
40.
Samburu (Elephants) by Karen McCall
Drinking chai tea
one night while camping in Kenya
I snap to attention
as roots groan,
bark shreds,
branches crack.
A small herd of elephants
pads softly near my tent,
tearing at trees
in search of food.
Adults rumble amiably and
snuffle up leaves.
A little one squeals.
I close my eyes
to fully savor the presence of this gentle sorority--
when the matriarch booms a thunderous growl
that jerks my rag-doll body
into the air.
Upon landing,
I rearrange my limbs
and regain my composure.
Nerves soothed,
drama complete.
Trusting, that the elephants trust me,
I fall asleep to the lullaby
of their, now quiet, feasting.
I rise with the sun
to a chorus of snoring and farting.
Next to my tent
five leathery mountains,
three adults two calves,
lie curled on their sides asleep.
The sixth elephant stands silently
guarding her family.
She must have seen or heard me
because the group floats to their feet in an instant.
And —
what a trick—
these giants vanish
like smoke.
All night long we had slept
next to each other
commingling breath,
dreaming of a new world built of grass and sky
where the Messiah is a mother.
Karen McCall
April 28, 2019
41.
Howler Monkeys - by Karen McCall
In darkness, before
sun swallows night,
male Howler monkeys rumble-roar from tropical tree tops.
Then quiet
covers the forest.
Quiet
quiet
quiet…
Until,
an alpha male
once more
thunder-growls his warning to all potential rivals—
constructing castle walls
with sound
42.
Gray Encounter (Gray Whales)
By Karen McCall
Sea spray
bearing the tang of kelp and crustaceans
stings my face in the early light
as we skim across the surface
of the lagoon.
I am watching gray whales
feast and frolic
in the kiwi-colored shallows
of Magdalena Bay
when a cow-calf pair approaches our skiff.
The younger whale, only weeks old,
dwarfs our small boat.
His smooth elastic skin,
fresh from the shelter of his mother’s womb,
is already buttoned with barnacles.
Next to our bow,
he lifts his rostrum
out of the water
in friendly greeting.
His curious eye looks directly into mine
inviting my touch.
Before I stretch my fingers over the gunnels
to caress that infant cheek
Before the baby whale closes his eye in pleasure
at my touch
Before we linger
together like this
for a long part of an hou
His mother dives below
our panga and
lifts our boat a few inches higher in the sea.
We rise on her back,
emerging like an island from the brine.
She calculates
and pauses,
before
gently
letting
us
go.
43.
Raising Butterflies
By Karen McCall
In the dry aquarium in my kitchen,
a caterpillar
convulses with the promise of wings.
Parsley and milkweed within glass walls
create a small Eden
where fat fleshy cylinders feast,
then bubble out of old, too-tight skins
sending Monarchs, Painted Ladies, Black Swallowtails
into a transformative sleep.
In their final disrobing,
Monarch larvae leave behind
translucent, jade-green jewels
suspended from branches upon which
they once flexed and fed.
Their chrysalids store
a viscous caterpillar soup
that will morph into patterned, papery wings
designed to soar across seas.
On this morning,
one chrysalis darkens and trembles in contractions.
Green skin tears away
as twitching antennae emerge,
probing the alien air.
I midwife these birth-soaked butterflies
outdoors to cure in the sun.
The heat lifts them in the sky--
a confetti of wings.
44.
Fluffy
Not all cats are exotic
And mysterious
Mine was a lover
Almost like a dog
He’d hang with the family
At the dinner table
Gliding under our feet
Banging on the wooden chair legs
And calling for more and more attention
Enormous cat - maybe 25 lbs?
And not fat one bit
Like a small wildcat
Both long and thick
Powerful, but friendly
Thick white and black fur
In vast swatches
But white all under
Top of the head black
Half a mustache
Under his nose
When I would cry
e would come to me
Matching my sobs
With his loud meows
Amazing whiskers
Jutting out all over
Tickling my face
When I would kiss him
Sunday afternoons
I’d watch sports
Lying on my belly
On our enormous pillow
In the center of the family room
And that big cat would watch too
Stately perched on my back
Front paws up at my neck
Claws digging into my sweatshirt
His soft torso and
Back legs down to my bottom
Like one of them big
Weighted blankets
But way better
And as the afternoon
Groaned along
The sports lulling me to sleep
We’d both be sacked out
Me snoring loudly
The cat purr buzzing along
Intermittently
Squeezing his eyes shut
Again and again
-Mark Woollett
45.
Winter Turkeys
Gawky, overgrown
They have many hidden depths
Subtle in plumage
Circadian rhythms,
Patterns known only to them
Surviving the woods
They come twice a day
Scratch around diligently,
Depart without fuss
46.
Earthworm
An earthworm pharoah,
Pondering his daily count
Of hidden pyramids
His trillion fellahin
Quietly churning biosphere,
Might mock the overweening
High flown foolishness,
Human in the upper air
Seeking dark eternity,
Pity his single heart
This simple Ozymandias
Who knows not the faint purring
Of five hearts working
In perfect sync
With no respite.
47.
Pelicans - The Brown and the Great White
Quirky bag of tricks
Flapping high above the waves
Plummeting for fish
Her weighty cousin
The powerful stately Great White
Whale-like filters, scoops,
In crescent flotillas;
The Brown team suns on the rocks,
Makes occasional sweeps.
48.
Common Grackle (Written on St. Valentine’s Day)
Symphony of purples
Subtly shading into black:
Such elegant tones
Pure understatement!
Their calls and behaviour
Are far less subdued.
Does that rich plumage,
A semiotics feast of code
Liven grackle hearts ?
49.
Camels
(They say a camel’s
A horse designed by a committee
But I might say a horse
Is a camel designed by the same group
Who forgot to factor in the slow internal release of water)
(In the Bestiary)
Where do camels belong?
By the millions with us
Lords of arid places
Plodders and racers -
We’ve made them ships, race-horses
Beauties in our eyes
Too easy answers:
Water in those humps?
They spit in our eyes!
Centuries of trade routes
Caravans of precious goods
Most precious: culture
All in an eyeblink
Compared with that long epoch
Of perfect wildness,
The trials and errors
Stochastic percentages
Of changing climate
The savage seasons
Probed, tested blood and sinew
Left the wind-picked bones
Way out in the Gobi
The Bactrian survivors
No wild Dromedaries
Delicate cousins
On cold Andean slopes
Skittishly survive
Yet into the dry
Of the endless interior
Of Australia
Camels have escaped
Planted their wild imprint far
From human control
50.
Orange-kneed Tarantula
For him, adventure
Quests across the forest floor
A male stereotype
For her a cavern
Filled by her startling beauty:
She sits, guards, waits
The species evolved
Over untold millennia -
Hail, Costa Rica!
Glory of the clouds!
The deep time of the forest
Stirred by coming change
51.
Elf Owl
Parliaments of elfs
Would be Ruritanian -
Almost unnoticed
But the meek inherit
Playing dead is survival
And if they look back
Blood pools in the brain:
They have such small bird tricks
To keep them going
“Dignity” might be
A better noun - a “Dignity”
Of tiny, perfect owls
52.
Centenarian Fruit Bat
Held to ridicule
By humans far too eager
To laugh at faces
Bizarre in their eyes -
But to the bat in question
A workaday visage
A fine expression
To make a good impression
On juicy mangoes
53.
Elephants
Last of the great herds
The ultimate gardeners
Till with massive feet
54.
Fox Cubs
Playing in the dawn
Rehearsing the greater game
Of life, struggle, death.
55.
Racoons
Racoons parading
Clever young in line behind
Deft hands, eager brains
56.
Snowy Owl
Winter storm of life
Fiery guardian of her eggs
Sits still as death
57.
HORSE
When we think of the animals which have been widely domesticated, some of these species still exist but are often rare in the wild, while others have been radically changed through human contact. It is not surprising that there are many more poems and other writings about dogs, cats and horses than about other species, especially if domestication has led to animals becoming pets as well as working alongside their humans.
This is especially true for a handful of creatures who have maintained various roles in human service. Horses have lost many of their functions to machinery and become recreational pets, but they are still used as transport, herding and pack animals in parts of the world , and they were still part of warfare until the mid-twentieth century. Poetry to honor the horse is therefore rich and plentiful, from ancient times until now. As one would expect, this section needs to be large and diverse, and in our format it certainly does not need to be limited.
Shakespeqre's "Henry V" is his most evocative lines on the warhorse. In the famous prologue the horse has to be summoned by the imagination:
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
Later, before the climactic battle between the English and the French, the Dauphin's lines seem to me to be the ultimate testosterone-fueled tribute of the mounted warrior:
DAUPHIN
What a long night is this! I will not change my
horse with any that treads but on four pasterns.
Ca, ha! he bounds from the earth, as if his
entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus,
chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I
soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth
sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his
hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.
ORLEANS
He's of the colour of the nutmeg.
DAUPHIN
And of the heat of the ginger. It is a beast for
Perseus: he is pure air and fire; and the dull
elements of earth and water never appear in him, but
only in Patient stillness while his rider mounts
him: he is indeed a horse; and all other jades you
may call beasts.
Constable
Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.
DAUPHIN
It is the prince of palfreys; his neigh is like the
bidding of a monarch and his countenance enforces homage.
ORLEANS
No more, cousin.
DAUPHIN
Nay, the man hath no wit that cannot, from the
rising of the lark to the lodging of the lamb, vary
deserved praise on my palfrey: it is a theme as
fluent as the sea: turn the sands into eloquent
tongues, and my horse is argument for them all:
'tis a subject for a sovereign to reason on, and for
a sovereign's sovereign to ride on; and for the
world, familiar to us and unknown to lay apart
their particular functions and wonder at him. I
once writ a sonnet in his praise and began thus:
'Wonder of nature,'--
He has shaped man’s world
Ambition’s throne of power
Made hunters fly, made empires
The noblest of all
The patient giant pulling the plough
Sustains us, harvest to harvest
The echo of his unmistaken gait
In hollow dawn streets
Cold stone and brick
Milkman’s clinking bottles
Proudly astride him
The loping marathoner
Halfway to the sky
Can you hear them
Jostling on the horizon
A distant rumble?
Dark Horses
Bearing the cloaked four
More stamina than chargers
Swifter than the wind
Bucephalus
Nicknamed Bucephalus
Cowhead carried Alexander
Through all his battles
From the teenage king
To the wounded demigod
Who just outlived him
Piers the Ploughman
Piers the Ploughman
Knew eternity each day
Kept his furrows straight
His nameless draft horse
Knew the rhythm of his days
A parallel soul
58. PUDÚ
In the shimmering heat she thought she saw
A man leading a baby goat on a string.
On approaching him she gasped.
The tiny forest deer
Panted and puffed feverishly
In the scalding heat beside the road
His little cloven hooves on fire
The two sharp horns bowed
Eyes the colour of honey
That once glowed in the cool recesses of the forest
Now opaque, dying embers.
She brought him home, tended to him.
He died hours later, far from his green home.
Heartbroken, she carved his image.
It became the emblem of his forest
That had just, unlike him, been saved.
Cañi Sanctuary, Pucon, AraucanÃa, Chile
Viv Macadam
59.
Kangaroo
Delicate mother Kangaroo
Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plump-weighted,
And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! so much more
gently and finely lined than a rabbit's, or than a hare's,
Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop
which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.
Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face.
Her full antipodal eyes, so dark,
So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many
empty dawns in silent Australia.
Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders.
And then her great weight below the waist, her vast pale belly,
With a thin young yellow little paw hanging out, and
straggle of a long thin ear, like ribbon,
Like a funny trimming to the middle of her belly, thin
little dangle of an immature paw, and one thin ear.
Her belly, her big haunches
And, in addition, the great muscular python-stretch of her tail.
There, she shan't have any more peppermint drops.
So she wistfully, sensitively sniffs the air, and then turns,
goes off in slow sad leaps
On the long flat skis of her legs,
Steered and propelled by that steel-strong snake of a tail.
Stops again, half turns, inquisitive to look back.
While something stirs quickly in her belly, and a lean little
face comes out, as from a window,
Peaked and a bit dismayed,
Only to disappear again quickly away from the sight of the
world, to snuggle down in the warmth,
Leaving the trail of a different paw hanging out.
Still she watches with eternal, cocked wistfulness!
How full her eyes are, like the full, fathomless, shining
eyes of an Australian black-boy
Who has been lost so many centuries on the margins of
existence!
She watches with insatiable wistfulness.
Untold centuries of watching for something to come,
For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the
South.
Where nothing bites but insects and snakes and the sun,
small life.
Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried,
no leopard screeched, no lion coughed, no dog barked,
But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in the
haunted blue bush.
Wistfully watching, with wonderful liquid eyes.
And all her weight, all her blood, dropping sackwise down
towards the earth's centre,
And the live little-one taking in its paw at the door of her
belly.
D.H.Lawrence
60.
Snowshoe Hare
Brilliant fresh snow:
Its unmistakable tracks
Record a mission
The carriage of fur,
Blood, bone, sinew, brain, teeth, heart:
Purpose, survival
A beast of tactics
Thousands of testing winters
Close run into spring
61.
Fisher
The end of the line
True essence of predator
Red in tooth and claw
Just about its business.
Give it a respectful space
To be a fisher in
62.
Winter Weasel
Huntress of the snows!
Elegance, assured beauty,
Sauntering, lethal
63.
Snake
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
64.
Great Blue Heron
Patient on her rock
Tranced by daylight: the still world’s
Essence beak and fish
At dusk she takes off
Bony scaffolding swept back:
Mournful majesty
65.
Victoria Crowned Pigeon
Victoria Crowned PIgeons:
What delicate plumage -
And complex courtship -
There are bare bones
Somewhere underneath the show
But now is not the time to search for them.
He dances; She spreads
Her wings, raises them high, runs
Around him, legs slightly bent,
Uttering short hissing noises.
What a lot of fuss -
Let’s hope he’s worth it !
But who are we to laugh?
Do we understand? Really?
Passing strange the languages of love!
The Victoria Crowned Pigeons
As they unravel the mysteries of purpose
Deep in a forest designed for them to keep a low profile
(Or who designed what - after all those millennia who can tell?)
Will produce a single egg
And both will guard it with their dancing lives
And after a time of high exertion, privation and danger
The little darling will emerge.
66. First Moose Sighting - Kate Thompson
First Moose Sighting, Mac Hill, c. 1978
Skiing with friends one still February afternoon,
upland beechwood slides into tapestry: two sudden,
mythical profiles - soundless, long-legged, mossy gray
on gray, they graze on yellowed leaves - then, gently
as first flakes of snow, shuttle off through the trees
and are gone, back into the weave of winter.
67.
Awakened by Turkeys - Kate Thompson
‘Cross the lawn, clad in sleek brown and black,
Stepping, pecking, this morning they’re back:
Twelve ladies, one gent
In sedate regiment,
Soft remarking “Gob-gobbledy clack.”
68.
Brook’s Gecko
Geckos I have known:
Geniuses of solar power,
Vertical surfaces:
Brick, stone, glass, whitewash
Fastest at midday, by dusk
In shadow, cracks, holes
Eating, surviving
Quick sprints of taste, risk, danger
Long slow pause trances
69.
Domesticated Cow (Irish)
AFTERNOON WITH IRISH COWS
by Billy Collins
There were a few dozen who occupied the field
across the road from where we lived,
stepping all day from tuft to tuft,
their big heads down in the soft grass,
though I would sometimes pass a window
and look out to see the field suddenly empty
as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.
Then later, I would open the blue front door,
and again the field would be full of their munching
or they would be lying down
on the black-and-white maps of their sides,
facing in all directions, waiting for rain.
How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded
they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.
But every once in a while, one of them
would let out a sound so phenomenal
that I would put down the paper
or the knife I was cutting an apple with
and walk across the road to the stone wall
to see which one of them was being torched
or pierced through the side with a long spear.
Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see
the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,
her neck outstretched, her bellowing head
laboring upward as she gave voice
to the rising, full-bodied cry
that began in the darkness of her belly
and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.
Then I knew that she was only announcing
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,
pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind
to all the green fields and the gray clouds,
to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,
while she regarded my head and shoulders
above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.
70.
Crows
It seems impossible:
So small a brain encompasses
Such great intelligence
But what do we know?
I know that when I walk out
Sharp eyes also scan
The landscape, comprehend
WithIn a different frame,
Their alien reference:
I, reading their sky
See nothing on their canvas,
Their jostling model.
I can’t read the map.
They circle from their tree.
Their landmark centre
Fly out to beat the bounds
Stake out their resolutions,
Weave new patterns,
A world envisaged,
Networked by their matrixed quest
New pathways in the mind.
They caw their logic
Chorusing the land’s dark soul
Telling its story -
But maybe simple joy
Shatters tight confining bonds,
Proclaims its mindless passion !
71.
Stickleback
A male role model!
(Too much information to put into haiku form!)
He builds a house -
Guess where the glue comes from, chaps?
His own body, of course, where else?
Ladies (plural) visit and lay their eggs,
And off they swim - don’t ask.
He fertilizes the eggs -
I hope that gives him a little ?pleasure ?satisfaction?
Then it’s just work work work,
Guard the house, see off predators
And the delicate duty not mentioned in the manual -
Fan the eggs so that they stay aerated -
Did he know that as a boy,
That that presumably 24/7 chore was in the job description?
The eggs need the care for three weeks,
I hazard that’s a long time in stickleback sticklerdom -
Then what? Is he done? Are there blissfully irresponsible grandfathers
Hanging out with the young?
I think not.
So spare a thought for the stickleback,
Anthropomorphised or not -
It’s worked for thousands of years -
Though I doubt there’s much of a thank you.
So how did it all evolve - this shining example of fairness,
The males stepping up, doing more of a job?
His tummy goes red in the process,
Is that a reward, or just a sign that he’s open for business?
This all happens in a very small, very complicated world.
72.
Nightingale
Noone seems to care
What a nightingale looks like -
Sturdy, solitary
Skulks in undergrowth
Dull brown and cream, nothing much
For humans to admire -
But ah! what sweet song
From dawn to dusk, and onward
To midnight and beyond!
A superstar, no less!
The voice of sleepless lovers
Lighting up the night!
73.
Swifts
Gravity defiers!
Only angels are more aerial
And they do not lay eggs
74.
Baby Tortoise by D.H.Lawrence
You know what it is to be born alone,
The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell,
And remain lapsed on earth,
A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open,
To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base
And reach your skinny neck
And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage,
To take your first solitary bite
And move on your slow, solitary hunt.
Your bright, dark little eye,
Your eye of a dark disturbed night,
Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,
No one ever heard you complain.
You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,
Whither away, small bird?
Rather like a baby working its limbs,
Except that you make slow, ageless progress
The touch of sun excites you,
And the long ages, and the lingering chill
Opening your impervious mouth,
Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly gaping pincers;
Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,
Then close the wedge of your little mountain front,
Your face, baby tortoise.
Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head in its wimple
And look with laconic, black eyes?
Or is sleep coming over you again,
Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life
And slowly pitching itself against the inertia
Which had seemed invincible?
And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye,
What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row against,
What an incalculable inertia.
Little Ulysses, fore-runner,
No bigger than my thumb-nail,
All animate creation on your shoulder,
Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.
The ponderous, preponderate,
And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.
How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled sunshine,
Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.
Resting your head half out of your wimple
In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.
Alone, with no sense of being alone,
And hence six times more solitary;
Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages
Your little round house in the midst of chaos.
Over the edge of all things.
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.
All life carried on your shoulder,
Zebras
Grevy’s outdazzles
The galloping winking stripes
Spooking leonine eyes
(Grevy’s zebra is a bigger, stripier version of the Common Zebra)
76.
Zebras (2)
So what’s in zebras
That stays stubborn, forever wild?
Why untamable?
Can this be random,
A tangle in the DNA?
Or is this culture,
Behaviour transmitted?
A restlessness of spirit
The zebra air breathed?
77.
Rufus-tailed Jacamar
From snatching insects
Out of clean air, Jacamars
Alight, dig tunnels:
She leads, for breeding,
Shares the sitting, he by day
She through the long night
78.
Dipper
To walk a streambed
Takes particular talent
In a diving bird
The large rocky nest
With a dome and side entrance:
Dippers live in style !
79.
In Costa Rica
Against a blue sky
I saw scarlet macaws fly
Create Aztec art
In one brief moment
A pattern for the centuries
That could not be lost
80.
Hermit Crabs
On the beach at dusk
Along the tideline debris
Hermit crabs parade
Good housing is scarce
And needs changing frequently:
All is visible,
Finding critical:
Unlikely shells are scrambled
Barely squeezed in
Survival depends
On the possibility -
Comfort secondary
When the tide returns
The parade ends in triumph
But what of the homeless?
81.
Spider Monkey
Graceful calculus
Geometry in motionPentangular reach
Evolution's pace
Kept them and trees together -
How else this wonder?
Terraforming Mars
Might give their stretching children
A higher trapeze
82.
Muskrat
Faced with challenges
Their solutions similar
To those of beavers
With less landscaping
The muskrats find their niches
Enjoy discreetly
83.
Meerkat
Gregarious omnivores
Excellent sight, hearing, smell
Burrows, tunnels, chambers
Lords of creation?
Oh, but constantly alert:
Death comes from the sky!
84.
"Bats" by Randall Jarrell
(published 1964)
A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
and catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting--
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night, and echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it's going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
In moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night; at daybreak
The tired mother flaps home to her rafter.
The others all are there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside-down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping
child.
85.
Dozing March Bears
To wake or not to
Wake! That's the question - whether
The weather and the sap
Have made up their minds
It's time for deeper process
To stir the answer
86.
Kingfisher
The terrible beak
At the point of such brilliance
Is meaning its life
If it hurls itself
Repeatedly at the spot
Where the tunnel will start
The deadly weapon
Unerringly spears the fish
Drills up to the nest
Into the darkness
Tenderly brings love deep
To its meaning: life
87.
Babblers
Loud advertising:
Risky yet still comforting
For the feeding flock
Dense vegetation
Demands careful compromise:
Safety in numbers
Over millennia
The noise has worked well enough
For workaday birds
88.
Evolution's task:A babies' waterproof pouch
That allows them air -
A ring of muscle!
The babies stay dry and warm
But how do they breathe?
Opossum magic!
How many drowned or passed out
Before the mystery?
89.
Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, 'Come!'
Lovely in dye and fan,
A-tremble in shimmering grace,
A moth from her winter swoon
Uplifts her face:
Stares from her glamorous eyes;
Wafts her on plumes like mist;
In ecstasy swirls and sways
To her strange tryst.
Walter de la Mare
90.
Loon
Spirit of two worlds:
When the lakes freeze, the ocean
The Great Northern Diver
One of many seabirds
On the margins with the raven
Among the raucous gulls, the ducks,
Herons, the fishers, scavengers
Gliding in the plane above the waves
Diving into the salty riches
In summer monarch of the ponds
The handsome liveried possessor
The splendid estate, the untidy nest
Precious chicks to teach and bear upon one’s back
Just once I met him under water
Flying powerfully in the chase
Oblivious of the clumsy human
And day and night the haunting call,
The cries of contact and alarm
The wild calling itself
Mourning for the centuries of survival
The thrilling notes across the water
The bubbling spring of resurrection
The echoes of past ages
The slow pulse of the land
Strong wingbeat of the seasons
The spreading circles of the rippling years
Fading, fading to the edge
90.
The Snail By Walter de la Mare
All day shut fast in whorled retreat
You slumber where - no wild bird knows;
While on your rounded roof-tree beat
The petals of the rose.
The grasses sigh above your house
Through drifts of darkness azure sweep
The sun-motes where the mosses drowse
That soothe your noonday sleep.
But when to ashes in the west
Those sun-fires die; and, silver, slim,
Eve, with the moon upon her breast,
Smiles on the uplands dim;
Then, all your wreathed house astir,
Horns reared, grim mouth, deliberate pace,
You glide in silken silence where
The feast awaits your grace.
Strange partners, Snail! Then I, abed,
Consign the thick-darked vault to you,
Nor heed what sweetness night may shed
Nor moonshine's slumbrous dew.
91.
A Robin (The European Robin)by Walter de la Mare
Ghost-grey the fall of night,
Ice-bound the lane,
Lone in the dying light
Flits he again;
Lurking where shadows steal,
Perched in his coat of blood,
Man's homestead at his heel,
Death-still the wood.
Odd restless child,. it's dark;
All wings are flown
But this one wizard's - hark!-
Stone clapped on stone !
Changeling and solitary,
Secret and sharp and small,
Flits he from tree to tree,
Calling on all.
Flying Dragon
Evolving glory:
Ribs and skin, slow distortion:
Lizard to dragon
Still descends to earth
Buries rare draconian eggs
Reassumes the sky
93.
Fox (1)
Foxes have colonized London spectacularly in recent times, and for many city people they are the major wildlife presence. For people in England seven hundred years ago the wild was a close and surrounding reality. The poet of the great 14th. century poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" was someone who knew his animals and the world of hunting very well. Here is the description of the beginning of a hunt.The translation into modern English does not carry all the specialized vocabulary of the original, but gives us a brief glimpse of wily Renard, and I recommend a complete reading of the story, which also has embedded vivid deer and a memorably fierce wild boar - More on the fox in later posts - Richard
'"Twas a fair frosty morning, for the sun rose red in ruddy vapour, and the welkin was clear of clouds. The hunters scattered them by a forest side, and the rocks rang again with the blast of their horns. Some came on the scent of a fox, and a hound gave tongue; the huntsmen shouted, and the pack followed in a crowd on the trail. The fox ran before them, and when they saw him they pursued him with noise and much shouting, and he wound and turned through many a thick grove, often cowering and hearkening in a hedge. At last by a little ditch he leapt out of a spinney, stole away slily by a copse path, and so out of the wood and away from the hounds. But he went, ere he wist, to a chosen tryst, and three started forth on him at once, so he must needs double back, and betake him to the wood again.
Then was it joyful to hearken to the hounds; when all the pack had met together and had sight of their game they made as loud a din as if all the lofty cliffs had fallen clattering together. The huntsmen shouted and threatened, and followed close upon him so that he might scarce escape, but Reynard was wily, and he turned and doubled upon them, and led the lord and his men over the hills, now on the slopes, now in the vales, while the knight at home slept through the cold morning beneath his costly curtains.-"
94.
PYTHON
Swaggering prince
Giant among snakes.
They say python has no house.
I heard it a long time ago
And I laughed and laughed and laughed.
For who owns the ground under the lemon grass?
Who owns the ground under the elephant grass?
Who owns the swamp - father of rivers?
Who owns the stagnant pool - father of waters?
Because they never walk hand in hand
People say that snakes only walk singly.
But just imagine
Suppose the viper walks in front
The green mamba follows
And the python creeps rumbling behind -
Who will be brave enough
To wait for them?
Yoruba Poem (Author not identified)
95.
Dik-Dik
Shy, dainty, graceful,
Secretive, fierce, defensive,
Protecting its world
Monarch of the glen?
Majesty's alternate guize
Quiet nobility
Nuclear family
One life mate, a single fawn
To strive and die for
96.
Beaver
Up and down ladders
Of western ponds, mountain streams
Many generations
Have wrought the landscape
Into managed farms, of decades
In wild rotation
Strength from head to tail
Teeth to bring down mighty trees
Tails to power water
Swim or sound alarm
A strong frame for winter sleep
Dive through frigid water
To the dry platform
The dark dreams of milky warmth
Security from work
Instinctual, a world reshaped
The ultimate artisans
Unconscious artists
97.
Cat’s Gaze
The cat's steady gaze
Unwavering for threats, prey, jumps -
A commanding view
98.
Leech
On the edge of ponds
Leeches play a waiting game
Feast or famine, which?
The reward, rich blood
The force of life surpassing
Complete fulfilment
High stakes either way
Death or intoxicating
Deliciousness
They can wait a year.A game to try the patience
Has worked for aeons
99.
Porcupine, early spring
Every afternoon
Impenetrable of purpose
He crosses our field
Slow and steady gait
Impervious to every movement,
Threat or encounter
For him the world comes
Unfolding at his approach -
Not keen on surprise
100
Lion
Twenty hours a day
To bask in magnificence
Seems appropriate-
Woe betide the rest
Of all those other mammals
When hunger spurs on!
It transpires of course
The females do the serious work
The males are mostly show
But oh the decline
The sad, inevitable
Onset of old age!
The king's a shadow -
When tomorrow dawns, the Pride
Has gone - Long Live the King!
101, Peepers
Peepers
There's risk in this bravado
You are after all just a snack
A titchy Hell's Angel riding your decibels
By the swamp the wrong side of the tracks
Why sing in trios,
The aim to turn up the volume
And solo become top frog?
If you make it, the biggest and brassiest
Impressing that She-All-That-Counts
If it's your eggs get laid in the water
Ultimate excitement mounts!
The moment to regain your poise
No more strutting your noise
A generation lies there waiting to be born -
And you, you little piece of neat machismo
You can lay down your horn.
102.
The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins - 1844-1889
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. --
(The name is an old one for the Kestrel)
103.
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
Ted Hughes
D.H.Lawrence - the Whales They say the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep of the sea
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's fathomless body.
And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.
And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
and all this happiness in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!
and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea. . I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
106.
The Oil Bird
Perfect troglodyte! Roosts in total darkness: Large eyes defeated -
Echolocation! Night forays, swallows fruit whole Digests in cave, safe
Babies fattened -oil! Their sad destiny so named By rapacious humans
The adults, elegant Of wing and tail- the reason? Because, yes, because...
107.
Why did the phalaropes take to swimming, Reverse the rigid gender roles - The showy, strutting females, the shy, diligent dowdy males? How did the planets align for that? Olm
All over the world Pale denizens in caves survive Slowly losing eyes,
Legs, hope, habitat - The olm becoming legend
Embodies stubborn life Whimbrel
Arrived from far south As snow goes the male displays The nest’s a scrape
A month’s incubating They share, and both care for them Summer’s long six weeks
Then the parents leave! Later, the fledglings migrate With lonely instinct
Yet, drifting over fells The rippling call of genius, The haunting soundscape
The bubbling echoes of Elysium
Her nest a citadel Immured in safety, in trust She sits on her eggs
He guards and feeds her Later she breaks out: the young Feed through the cell door
108.
Sun Birds
Failed hummingbirds? Could one say that of birds so Utterly gorgeous?
But no ho\vering ! Large and clumsy feet that grip Beaks that drill sideways
Where tongues cannot reach Sharp metallic calls, distinct. Spider-hunters drab - why?
Mysteries surround them Yet they are there, triumphant ! Sunbirds of Africa, beyond ! --
109. - Blue Whale
On planet Ocean What overwhelms the judgment: Not how vast, how much at home, How utterly complete you are: It is the mystery in your brain, The traffic we may never know, What the universe whispers in the tongues of space, What peace it is that passes understanding, What patterns you translate from sky to deep to sky, The thought of the thoughts, The art your thought embodies, That utter unfathomability
Reflected in the ocean of the sky
110.
Whimbrel
Arrived from far south As snow goes the male displays The nest’s a scrape
A month’s incubating They share, and both care for them Summer’s long six weeks
Then the parents leave! Later, the fledglings migrate With lonely instinct
Yet, drifting over fells The rippling call of genius, The haunting soundscape
The bubbling echoes of Elysium
111.
The Olm
All over the world Pale denizens in caves survive Slowly losing eyes,
Legs, hope, habitat - The olm becoming legend
Embodies stubborn life
112. Sowerby''s Beaked Whale
Conjured from the deep Washed onto an alien beach Your mystery intact
We know so little: Named two hundred years ago Remained in darkness : For millennia Minds its own perfect business
113. Goldfinches
Minting each new dawnThe scattering currency Of innocent gold
114.
Naked Mole Rat
Age cannot wither The rat born withered She, queen forever
Never ages, rules Her court in earthy darkness Her minions waiting
Living the secrets Of chemistry, the body Timeless and entranced
115.
--Chevrotain
Across the Old World Chevrotains! Much to teach us, Shy, mate without fuss
Foraging at night One precious baby to feed: A dedicated year.
116 - The Red Phalarope
Why did the phalaropes take to swimming, Reverse the rigid gender roles - The showy, strutting females, the shy, diligent dowdy males? How did the planets align for that?
117.
Black Heron
To overshadow With a dark circle of wings And fix the waters
With a patient eye Is a unique mystery Passed inscrutably
118, The Male Capercaillie
Black knight of the woods The jaunting dancer rampant
Flourishing his genes
119.
A Murder of Crows In their raucous assemblyHas gathered today
Their cacophony Always ominous, may endIn judicial killing --
Its sinister power Precisely transmitted through That collective noun
120. Wolf
Down the centuries He pads in parallel, close But on the dark edge
Of our consciousness While his renegade cousins Lie at home, keep watch
And never know him, Wild, magnificent and free Or what they have lost
121. Pampas Deer
Fleet and elegant Suffers loss of habitat Moves into the woods
What caused the male deer
To stay with her, and help his mate Protect the newborn?
122. Hawk Moth and Orange-kneed Tarantula
Sometimes the wasp wins Sometimes the spider: balanced Combat for ever
Sometimes the spider dies Sometimes the wasp nurtures all The baby spiders
And round and round They Dance the minuet of death As long as the cloud forest lives, and the Earth turns.
123. Northern Ghost Bat
Northern Ghost Bat
Why so different? Solitary, white, all others Dark, clouds, colonies?
Life against the grain? Deeply temperamental? An individual?
124. Puffin
Evolving penguins! Their flight a frantic scramble Swimming a delight
125. Fireflies
Firelfies
It's complicated!
Bioluminescence may Signify fireflies
But other beetlesKnow the same trick, to dazzle
Their mates with glory
And show the dull world
The brilliant constellations Of themselves, the stars.
126. Mountain Sheep
The magnificenceOf those splendid horns belies Quite a modest creature.
And yet on its cliffs It has mastered gravity To reach specks of grass
Climbing Mouse
In the deep forest Secretive, climbing at night The highest branches
Burrows in tree roots Finds its labyrinthine path 128. Mountain Lion
This lion has been seen To leap impossibly high, A deer in its mouth
And has roamed the land Thousands of miles West to East Ignoring boundaries
Houses, roads, power lines Civilization's clutter - Died in Connecticut
Carrying its own Vast particular wildness Through hidden pathways
Stealthy, nocturnal, Crepuscular, glimpsed seldom . And what of its prey?
Fleet of foot, wide-eyed The calculus of energy To bone and sinew
Long, low and lean Greyhound-shaped, fiercely enhanced - Feline of splendours
129. Saw-whet Owl
Saw-Whet Owl
Tiny, ferocious Fierce recluses of the woods Scimitar talons
Cutting through flesh, bone Dissecting modest creatures Less emphatic lives 130. Sandhill Crane |
Clan fidelity!
The family groups migrating
Stay close together
In the great tribal
Sweep of thousands over time,
Grandeurs of landscape,
Long generationsOf finely balanced kindred
Centuries in order
131. Anaconda
Nothing seems beyond
The sinuous reach of a giant
Anaconda's coils
Basking in the warm
Torpor of a tropical downpour
As streams flow under
The richly festooned branches
Of the ancient rain forestFlourishing life high into the canopy
Where light and air conspire,
Surpass the realm of snakes
Weighing five hundred pounds
132. Condor
CondorSailing the updraughts
Sky-fingerer, mountain comber
Lord of carrion
--133. Locust
Mildly reclusive,
A quiet green grasshopper
Chewing in the wings
Like desert flowers
Blooms profusion after rains
A sudden orgy
Plague or bonanza?
Depends on your point of view
Human or locust
Moving plenitude
Devastating whole landscapes
Only fools obstruct
natural cycle
Ancient, older than the Bible's
Visitation from an interfering God.
134. River Otters
The joy of living
Is perfectly on display
Mammalian quintessence
Pouring down muddy
Slopes - evolution at play,
Each moment perfected
Now, young raised and flown
Neighbours tell faithful spouses
True states of affairs
135. Tree Frog - Costa Rica
Its ocean swaying
High in the misty forest
The world in a leaf
136. Toads
Toads are poisonousWarty, squat, prone to orgies
Dry-skinned secretive
Insectivorous frogs
With a little less elegance -
Don't become princes.
137. Tsetse Fly
This most mighty fly
Drew a line across Africa
Beyond which no Whites
Pushing wagons North
With their exotic cattleCould conquer, survive
Each baby bloodsucker
Born live, a single darling
138. 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
139. 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.
140.
Stag Beetles
Enlarged to the human scale
Arthurian phantasms
Evolved for battle:
The romance of derring-do
Evolved, incarnate
141. Damselles
Oh! the amazingImpossibly 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.
142. Barred Owls Calling
Now, young raised and flown
Neighbours tell faithful spouses
True states of affairs
143.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
A challenging epic -
Feeding the high metabolism
The struggles, the fights for turf -
Life in the fast lane
he costs of panache,
The brilliant precision
Stunning survival -
144.
AxolotlA salamander
That never grows up and stays
An aqueous creature
Lives in deepest caves
Fades to pale transparency
Too perfect to live?
145. Snow Fleas
Antifreeze, spring-tails!
Life writ on winter paper
Peppering blind faith
Hopping meteorites
Landed on the pristine snows
Messages from space
Who could imagine
Such harmless innocence
Pure optimism!
146.
Jumping spider - Maevia Inclemens
Tiny predator's
Complex behaviour reveals
Worlds in grains of sand
Thousands of species
Perfecting micro kingdoms
Jostled territories
147.
Vicuna
Up in the high cold
The winds demand perfection
For bare survival
The thinnest of hair
On the delicate body
Traps the frigid air
Smells disappear
On the swept altiplano
Hearing dulls, founders -
Sight remains vital
Sharp, cutting, clears the miles
For camelid speed
Effortless grace
Defies the deadly harshness,
Beauty triumphant
.
148.
Bee Hummingbird (For Esther)
In a minute nest
On a branch of a tall tree
On the Isle of Pines
Lie two tiny eggs:
Inside them babies smaller
Than your fingernails.
They will crack open
Their world, cared for by mother
As superpowers grow:
Magnificent wings
Driven by musculature
That blurs their movement
And can fly backwards,
Hover, thrust their beaks deep, deep
In a thousand flowers,
Drinking the nectar
Through custom hollow tongues -
Life in the fast lane -
149.
Leopard Seal
Long, thin, fast, lethal
Less blubber, honed for speed
Tearing, rending mouth -
Perfect predator!
Patrols the southern seas
Fate-wielding beauty
150.
Screech Owls
Screech owls rarely screech
Even voicing Halloween
They live shy, ferocious
Huge eyes drink darkness
Their razor gripping talons
Slice the lives of prey
A terrible beauty
Their plumage subtly mimics
The woods around them
Quietly disappears
This coat of many colours
Perfect incognito
Fingering the night
Coasting through silence
Harbingers of death
151.
Golden Eagles, Isle of Mull, Scotland
Rising, spiralling
From a tall, untidy nest
Into realms of air
Is there joy there,
The soaring exultation
Beyond necessity?
The flight's a meeting
Of four eyes locked, ferocious
Scanning the state of the world
152.
The White Bulls of Rome
(Roman cattle were mostly red/brown, but a strain of huge white cattle was reserved for important sacrifice)
The haunting white bulls
Thousands of sacrifices
A river of blood
Their mournful lowing
Echoes down the corridors
Of stubborn meaning
Down through the centuries
Stolen from generations
They migrate the sky
153.
Dung Beetles
Strongest of insects!
If we could roll Jupiter
Along dusty paths
We might find the pride
To rival this Sisyphus
Whose endless labours
Recycle the shit
Dropped by us other creatures,
Humbly clean up
Take thoughtless leavings
Transform them into caches,
Survival palaces
154.
Bactrian Camel
Great ship of the steppes!
Whose gait oscillates the sea
Links worlds, continents.
Patient in extremes!
Your slow conquest of distance
Masters time itself
155.
Rats Transfiguring
Oh, that sinking ship!
Surviving cold and stormy seas
Flotsam, clinging on
And one day will hitch
An amazing ride through space
To brave new, desperate worlds
Just like our forebears
Scrabbling round the feet of giants
Took the human path
So they already
Skipping past the prototype
Tenaciously begin
The night climb up the ropes
Onto the welcoming ship,
The plenteous hold
156.
Marsh Treader
Walking on water
Takes some smart evolution
And clear objective
The surface tension
Of gravity and water
A world of its own
For easy sculling
On a giving trampoline
You can't beat a marsh
157. Piculets
Woodpecker cousins -
White-barred South America
Rufous, swathes of Asia
Tiny, brilliant
Bamboo-purposed nesters
Drill into the heart
An inch-wide entrance
To the place of eggs, of birth
Of hard-fought nurture
Of a world created by patient graft.
158.Vine Snake
Becoming a vineIs part of its survival:
Conceals predation.
Threatened, it rears up
Fans vivid hidden color
Opens its long mouth
In the endless chain
Its slender extremity:
Prolongs swift motion
Meanwhile the forest,
Intertwined from roots to sky
Stands proud, eternal.
159.Skinks
The mystery of the links'Twixt lizards, snakes and skinks
Reveals that over time
Diversity sublime
Began with hard decisions
That led to clear divisions -
The lifetime spoils were rich
Decisions on each niche
The question was of legs -
But here the question begs
Advantages both ways
The argument's a maze-
Most skinks grew legs and feet
For some that spelled defeat
Survival seemed profound
They burrowed underground
Some with legs vestigial
Some with bare residuals
So skinks can thrive 'most anywhere
Where life is plentiful or rare
In heat or even chillier
In places snakes find sillier
And lizards look for warming sun
To strut their stuff and have their fun.
So homage to the humble skinks
That bridge the gaps and span the links..
160. Tamarin
On his haunches
Deft hands sorting seeds
So easily anthropomorphized
A little bearded man absorbed
Patient in the workaday
161. Two modest species, not closely related to each other -Okapi and Pygmy Hippopotamus
Leading quiet, shy lives
Smaller forest relatives,
Diverse, on the brink
Their major cousins,
The dangerous 'potamis
The glamorous giraffe
Evolved in culs de sac
Would stand alone without them
Giant outliers, islands of destiny Maladapted to lives elsewhere--
While the Okapi, disappearing in the dappled light
The 'Potamus walking the river bed
Are both perfected in their niche.
162. Ostrich
Bird of questing look!
Unwavering guardianship,
Equal height to mine
Protector of young -
A savannah world of giants
Of savage dangers
Massive legs for speedA kick to fell a zebra,
Banish hence a lion
Persistence to stay,
To outface every ambush,
Outstare the hunters
The evolving trade
Of heft for flight
Like ours, of mind for soul.
163. Lion
In the Franklin Zoo, Boston, where one old lion, Dinari, survives his brother, and is not judged fit
in his last days to receive another companion -
People made his kopjeA place of sweeping command
A rock of loneliness
With Kamaia gone
Swept away by the stiff broom
Dinari, solitary lord
Drinks his long draught of perfect grief
Too old, too life-set
To receive a fresh another
He lies, turns, settles
And sniffs the air so pregnant
With the beings and doings
Of caring apes he cannot hunt,
Who gaze in baffled awe.
164.
Argentine Ants
Each worker plods up
Bearing earth into the light
Lives the labyrinth
Pour tons of concrete
Into the hidden city:
When set, reveal
The network divides
Ramifies from nest to nest
Borders bedrock, seas
Limited by food
Precious juggernauts of queens
Realms of genes
erable armies:
Only Armageddon
True apocalypse
Halts the silent progress
Massing conquests below
165. House Mouse
These modest rodents
Descendants of survivors
Burrowed, starved, scrabbled
Millions of hard years,
Ramified adaptations
Dark-cornered genius
Surrender their young
To multiple predators
Yet overtake death
Thrive on scraps, the drops
And leavings of the careless
Even venturing into light
166. Fireflies
Two thousand species
Of the great beetle family
A life of two months
The stars of the Earth
Their bioluminescence
Signatures of love
I have seen a host
Reply in sync to lightning
Riding waves of storm
In total silence
Brilliant in the darkness
Mirroring the sky
-BEYOND MUSING 2
My kind, my kin
All our spirit animals
Look at us in the world mirror
Life the unknowing
The drum skin stretched across the sphere
The plenitude of species
The niches sought, adapted, filled
The searching relentless
Water, carbon,oxygen, nitrogen,
The family of elements
Morphing through nature in the dance of sunlight
Walking, crawling, creeping, swimming, flying
The silence broken by this orchestra of upstarts
From humble workers through magnificence to us
The consciousness, the cortex
Leaping the firestorm of heartbeats
We, the pharaohs, the fantasy kings and queens
Spreadeagled on the future
Lost and sealed in the pyramid
The brilliant torch bearers
Leading the faltering parade.
The Adonis Blue
Belongs to the land,
The rock, fluttering above the chalk
The Adonis Blue fritillary
Blue flor the joy of it
A summer piece of sky
But what an earlier story!
The eggs laid under leaves -
Only the Horsehair Vetch will do -
The caterpillar has a journey
Before the astounding metamorphosis -
Strong enough to overwinter on the Downs
Taken by the ants, buried, protected,
Milked of its sugars, payment for life
And on a glorious day breaks free
Flies to the empyrean
A specialist for the connoisseurs
As long as Emgland stands
An emerald set in a silver sea.
The White Stork
Heron-like but not so mournful
And air of purpose, knows its business
Winters in Africa, summers in Europe
Where the huge nests proclaim thriving
Year after year.
Standing four feet high
Quiet, ubiquitous
Tolerates the human habitats
The opportunities
Year after year after year
And on through the centuries.
If the climate holds
If the winds do not rise
To blow those nests to pieces
If the drought does not extend the Sahara
Into Iberia. France, Italy, Greece
And all the islands
All the southern swathes of Rome
They will fly in over Gibraltar and the Bosporus
The way of African invasions
And settle down to husband the lands
Survey the world from dizzying heights
Help grounded humans feel at home.
Star-nosed Mole
Living in darkness
A ferocious omnivore
Your hand leads your face
You were born with what
Only elephants can rival
That sensitive snout
You scuttle along
The narrow tunnels, hunting.
When danger threatens
Or earthfall blocks the way
You change to swift reversing
Running boldly backwards
Ruler of a small world
Spooling up the royal progress
Through the passages of night
Tiger Beetle
Speed is survival!
But at the cost of frailty?
A dangerous balance!
Red Wood Ants
(Inspired by an article in the National Geographic with
superb photographs)
Guardians of the woods!
Builders of air-conditioned nests
Gleaners, recyclers
Immensely powerful
Mandibles, poison defence
Husband sugars, proteins
Colonies of millions
In return for protection
Tend milking parlours
Of captive aphids
Counter pathogens
With poisoned tree resin
Serve the precious queens
In thrall to hyper-females
On whom life depends
Daddy Longlegs
Called Daddy Longlegs
Species of understory
One spider, one a
?Harmless forager:
A darker myth of poison
Confuses our picture.
Prevents our question:
For what did such a scaffold
Evolve?
Why so vulnerable,
So prone to disaster
Why their place in the plenitude of life?
Honey Buzzard
Accipitridae!
What a grand diversity!
Kites! Vultures! Buzzards!
Those eagle feet, wings!
Even roughened soles of feet -
Common ancestry!
Down the long ages
From dinosaur cousins’ times
The hawks hunt the dead,
The living, eggs, snails,
Even bees and wasps!
The honey buzzard’s feathers
Protect it from stings
Feeding on honey,
Larvae, hymenoptera
Themselves, nips off stings -
Careful precision!
Both the good parents
Nurture the single young
One by precious one
Lammergeier Bearded Vulture
Long, patient hours,days,
Soaring above the mountains -
That remains the trick
Lammergeier’s prey
Is not going anywhere.
It just takes finding
Perhaps just for bones
Carried up, dropped onto rocks,
Split for the marrow
A scavenger then
The leavings of the others
Linking the food chain
In flight majestic
Its graceful acrobatics
Dignify the sky
Belie its grim trade
MARINE SCORPION
In Jurassic times
An eight-foot scorpion roamed seas
Replete with giants
A cast of actors
Playing out their acts of blood
Their daily business
But were there moments
Of peaceful equilibrium
Balancing the tides,
The flowing of the light
The wind-stirred waves kindly warming
The descending water into night?
Picture a scorpion
Well-defended, armed and armoured
On a day without a fight
KRILL
Eco-balancer!
Arbiter of the food chain
Vital central link
This magical shrimp
Conjures the greatest creature
Ever on the planet
Summons the nutrients
From the cold churning waters
Manna for baleen
The ocean's plenty
Sieved from the sunlight
By the seething myriad
cc
 | |
-BEYOND MUSING 2
My kind, my kin
All our spirit animals
Look at us in the world mirror
Life the unknowing
The drum skin stretched across the sphere
The plenitude of species
The niches sought, adapted, filled
The searching relentless
Water, carbon,oxygen, nitrogen,
The family of elements
Morphing through nature in the dance of sunlight
Walking, crawling, creeping, swimming, flying
The silence broken by this orchestra of upstarts
From humble workers through magnificence to us
The consciousness, the cortex
Leaping the firestorm of heartbeats
We, the pharaohs, the fantasy kings and queens
Spreadeagled on the future
Lost and sealed in the pyramid
The brilliant torch bearers
Leading the faltering parade.
The Adonis Blue
Belongs to the land,
The rock, fluttering above the chalk
The Adonis Blue fritillary
Blue flor the joy of it
A summer piece of sky
But what an earlier story!
The eggs laid under leaves -
Only the Horsehair Vetch will do -
The caterpillar has a journey
Before the astounding metamorphosis -
Strong enough to overwinter on the Downs
Taken by the ants, buried, protected,
Milked of its sugars, payment for life
And on a glorious day breaks free
Flies to the empyrean
A specialist for the connoisseurs
As long as Emgland stands
An emerald set in a silver sea.
The White Stork
Heron-like but not so mournful
And air of purpose, knows its business
Winters in Africa, summers in Europe
Where the huge nests proclaim thriving
Year after year.
Standing four feet high
Quiet, ubiquitous
Tolerates the human habitats
The opportunities
Year after year after year
And on through the centuries.
If the climate holds
If the winds do not rise
To blow those nests to pieces
If the drought does not extend the Sahara
Into Iberia. France, Italy, Greece
And all the islands
All the southern swathes of Rome
They will fly in over Gibraltar and the Bosporus
The way of African invasions
And settle down to husband the lands
Survey the world from dizzying heights
Help grounded humans feel at home.
Star-nosed Mole
Living in darkness
A ferocious omnivore
Your hand leads your face
You were born with what
Only elephants can rival
That sensitive snout
You scuttle along
The narrow tunnels, hunting.
When danger threatens
Or earthfall blocks the way
You change to swift reversing
Running boldly backwards
Ruler of a small world
Spooling up the royal progress
Through the passages of night
Tiger Beetle
Speed is survival!
But at the cost of frailty?
A dangerous balance!
Red Wood Ants
(Inspired by an article in the National Geographic with
superb photographs)
Guardians of the woods!
Builders of air-conditioned nests
Gleaners, recyclers
Immensely powerful
Mandibles, poison defence
Husband sugars, proteins
Colonies of millions
In return for protection
Tend milking parlours
Of captive aphids
Counter pathogens
With poisoned tree resin
Serve the precious queens
In thrall to hyper-females
On whom life depends
Daddy Longlegs
Called Daddy Longlegs
Species of understory
One spider, one a
?Harmless forager:
A darker myth of poison
Confuses our picture.
Prevents our question:
For what did such a scaffold
Evolve?
Why so vulnerable,
So prone to disaster
Why their place in the plenitude of life?
Honey Buzzard
Accipitridae!
What a grand diversity!
Kites! Vultures! Buzzards!
Those eagle feet, wings!
Even roughened soles of feet -
Common ancestry!
Down the long ages
From dinosaur cousins’ times
The hawks hunt the dead,
The living, eggs, snails,
Even bees and wasps!
The honey buzzard’s feathers
Protect it from stings
Feeding on honey,
Larvae, hymenoptera
Themselves, nips off stings -
Careful precision!
Both the good parents
Nurture the single young
One by precious one
Lammergeier Bearded Vulture
Long, patient hours,days,
Soaring above the mountains -
That remains the trick
Lammergeier’s prey
Is not going anywhere.
It just takes finding
Perhaps just for bones
Carried up, dropped onto rocks,
Split for the marrow
A scavenger then
The leavings of the others
Linking the food chain
In flight majestic
Its graceful acrobatics
Dignify the sky
Belie its grim trade
MARINE SCORPION
In Jurassic times
An eight-foot scorpion roamed seas
Replete with giants
A cast of actors
Playing out their acts of blood
Their daily business
But were there moments
Of peaceful equilibrium
Balancing the tides,
The flowing of the light
The wind-stirred waves kindly warming
The descending water into night?
Picture a scorpion
Well-defended, armed and armoured
On a day without a fight
KRILL
Eco-balancer!
Arbiter of the food chain
Vital central link
This magical shrimp
Conjures the greatest creature
Ever on the planet
Summons the nutrients
From the cold churning waters
Manna for baleen
The ocean's plenty
Sieved from the sunlight
By the seething myriad
cc
| |
-BEYOND MUSING 2
My kind, my kin
All our spirit animals
Look at us in the world mirror
Life the unknowing
The drum skin stretched across the sphere
The plenitude of species
The niches sought, adapted, filled
The searching relentless
Water, carbon,oxygen, nitrogen,
The family of elements
Morphing through nature in the dance of sunlight
Walking, crawling, creeping, swimming, flying
The silence broken by this orchestra of upstarts
From humble workers through magnificence to us
The consciousness, the cortex
Leaping the firestorm of heartbeats
We, the pharaohs, the fantasy kings and queens
Spreadeagled on the future
Lost and sealed in the pyramid
The brilliant torch bearers
Leading the faltering parade.
The Adonis Blue
Belongs to the land,
The rock, fluttering above the chalk
The Adonis Blue fritillary
Blue flor the joy of it
A summer piece of sky
But what an earlier story!
The eggs laid under leaves -
Only the Horsehair Vetch will do -
The caterpillar has a journey
Before the astounding metamorphosis -
Strong enough to overwinter on the Downs
Taken by the ants, buried, protected,
Milked of its sugars, payment for life
And on a glorious day breaks free
Flies to the empyrean
A specialist for the connoisseurs
As long as Emgland stands
An emerald set in a silver sea.
The White Stork
Heron-like but not so mournful
And air of purpose, knows its business
Winters in Africa, summers in Europe
Where the huge nests proclaim thriving
Year after year.
Standing four feet high
Quiet, ubiquitous
Tolerates the human habitats
The opportunities
Year after year after year
And on through the centuries.
If the climate holds
If the winds do not rise
To blow those nests to pieces
If the drought does not extend the Sahara
Into Iberia. France, Italy, Greece
And all the islands
All the southern swathes of Rome
They will fly in over Gibraltar and the Bosporus
The way of African invasions
And settle down to husband the lands
Survey the world from dizzying heights
Help grounded humans feel at home.
Star-nosed Mole
Living in darkness
A ferocious omnivore
Your hand leads your face
You were born with what
Only elephants can rival
That sensitive snout
You scuttle along
The narrow tunnels, hunting.
When danger threatens
Or earthfall blocks the way
You change to swift reversing
Running boldly backwards
Ruler of a small world
Spooling up the royal progress
Through the passages of night
Tiger Beetle
Speed is survival!
But at the cost of frailty?
A dangerous balance!
Red Wood Ants
(Inspired by an article in the National Geographic with
superb photographs)
Guardians of the woods!
Builders of air-conditioned nests
Gleaners, recyclers
Immensely powerful
Mandibles, poison defence
Husband sugars, proteins
Colonies of millions
In return for protection
Tend milking parlours
Of captive aphids
Counter pathogens
With poisoned tree resin
Serve the precious queens
In thrall to hyper-females
On whom life depends
Daddy Longlegs
Called Daddy Longlegs
Species of understory
One spider, one a
?Harmless forager:
A darker myth of poison
Confuses our picture.
Prevents our question:
For what did such a scaffold
Evolve?
Why so vulnerable,
So prone to disaster
Why their place in the plenitude of life?
Honey Buzzard
Accipitridae!
What a grand diversity!
Kites! Vultures! Buzzards!
Those eagle feet, wings!
Even roughened soles of feet -
Common ancestry!
Down the long ages
From dinosaur cousins’ times
The hawks hunt the dead,
The living, eggs, snails,
Even bees and wasps!
The honey buzzard’s feathers
Protect it from stings
Feeding on honey,
Larvae, hymenoptera
Themselves, nips off stings -
Careful precision!
Both the good parents
Nurture the single young
One by precious one
Lammergeier Bearded Vulture
Long, patient hours,days,
Soaring above the mountains -
That remains the trick
Lammergeier’s prey
Is not going anywhere.
It just takes finding
Perhaps just for bones
Carried up, dropped onto rocks,
Split for the marrow
A scavenger then
The leavings of the others
Linking the food chain
In flight majestic
Its graceful acrobatics
Dignify the sky
Belie its grim trade
MARINE SCORPION
In Jurassic times
An eight-foot scorpion roamed seas
Replete with giants
A cast of actors
Playing out their acts of blood
Their daily business
But were there moments
Of peaceful equilibrium
Balancing the tides,
The flowing of the light
The wind-stirred waves kindly warming
The descending water into night?
Picture a scorpion
Well-defended, armed and armoured
On a day without a fight
KRILL
Eco-balancer!
Arbiter of the food chain
Vital central link
This magical shrimp
Conjures the greatest creature
Ever on the planet
Summons the nutrients
From the cold churning waters
Manna for baleen
The ocean's plenty
Sieved from the sunlight
By the seething myriad
cc
| |
-BEYOND MUSING 2
My kind, my kin
All our spirit animals
Look at us in the world mirror
Life the unknowing
The drum skin stretched across the sphere
The plenitude of species
The niches sought, adapted, filled
The searching relentless
Water, carbon,oxygen, nitrogen,
The family of elements
Morphing through nature in the dance of sunlight
Walking, crawling, creeping, swimming, flying
The silence broken by this orchestra of upstarts
From humble workers through magnificence to us
The consciousness, the cortex
Leaping the firestorm of heartbeats
We, the pharaohs, the fantasy kings and queens
Spreadeagled on the future
Lost and sealed in the pyramid
The brilliant torch bearers
Leading the faltering parade.
The Adonis Blue
Belongs to the land,
The rock, fluttering above the chalk
The Adonis Blue fritillary
Blue flor the joy of it
A summer piece of sky
But what an earlier story!
The eggs laid under leaves -
Only the Horsehair Vetch will do -
The caterpillar has a journey
Before the astounding metamorphosis -
Strong enough to overwinter on the Downs
Taken by the ants, buried, protected,
Milked of its sugars, payment for life
And on a glorious day breaks free
Flies to the empyrean
A specialist for the connoisseurs
As long as Emgland stands
An emerald set in a silver sea.
The White Stork
Heron-like but not so mournful
And air of purpose, knows its business
Winters in Africa, summers in Europe
Where the huge nests proclaim thriving
Year after year.
Standing four feet high
Quiet, ubiquitous
Tolerates the human habitats
The opportunities
Year after year after year
And on through the centuries.
If the climate holds
If the winds do not rise
To blow those nests to pieces
If the drought does not extend the Sahara
Into Iberia. France, Italy, Greece
And all the islands
All the southern swathes of Rome
They will fly in over Gibraltar and the Bosporus
The way of African invasions
And settle down to husband the lands
Survey the world from dizzying heights
Help grounded humans feel at home.
Star-nosed Mole
Living in darkness
A ferocious omnivore
Your hand leads your face
You were born with what
Only elephants can rival
That sensitive snout
You scuttle along
The narrow tunnels, hunting.
When danger threatens
Or earthfall blocks the way
You change to swift reversing
Running boldly backwards
Ruler of a small world
Spooling up the royal progress
Through the passages of night
Tiger Beetle
Speed is survival!
But at the cost of frailty?
A dangerous balance!
Red Wood Ants
(Inspired by an article in the National Geographic with
superb photographs)
Guardians of the woods!
Builders of air-conditioned nests
Gleaners, recyclers
Immensely powerful
Mandibles, poison defence
Husband sugars, proteins
Colonies of millions
In return for protection
Tend milking parlours
Of captive aphids
Counter pathogens
With poisoned tree resin
Serve the precious queens
In thrall to hyper-females
On whom life depends
Daddy Longlegs
Called Daddy Longlegs
Species of understory
One spider, one a
?Harmless forager:
A darker myth of poison
Confuses our picture.
Prevents our question:
For what did such a scaffold
Evolve?
Why so vulnerable,
So prone to disaster
Why their place in the plenitude of life?
Honey Buzzard
Accipitridae!
What a grand diversity!
Kites! Vultures! Buzzards!
Those eagle feet, wings!
Even roughened soles of feet -
Common ancestry!
Down the long ages
From dinosaur cousins’ times
The hawks hunt the dead,
The living, eggs, snails,
Even bees and wasps!
The honey buzzard’s feathers
Protect it from stings
Feeding on honey,
Larvae, hymenoptera
Themselves, nips off stings -
Careful precision!
Both the good parents
Nurture the single young
One by precious one
Lammergeier Bearded Vulture
Long, patient hours,days,
Soaring above the mountains -
That remains the trick
Lammergeier’s prey
Is not going anywhere.
It just takes finding
Perhaps just for bones
Carried up, dropped onto rocks,
Split for the marrow
A scavenger then
The leavings of the others
Linking the food chain
In flight majestic
Its graceful acrobatics
Dignify the sky
Belie its grim trade
MARINE SCORPION
In Jurassic times
An eight-foot scorpion roamed seas
Replete with giants
A cast of actors
Playing out their acts of blood
Their daily business
But were there moments
Of peaceful equilibrium
Balancing the tides,
The flowing of the light
The wind-stirred waves kindly warming
The descending water into night?
Picture a scorpion
Well-defended, armed and armoured
On a day without a fight
KRILL
Eco-balancer!
Arbiter of the food chain
Vital central link
This magical shrimp
Conjures the greatest creature
Ever on the planet
Summons the nutrients
From the cold churning waters
Manna for baleen
The ocean's plenty
Sieved from the sunlight
By the seething myriad
cc
| |
-BEYOND MUSING 2
My kind, my kin
All our spirit animals
Look at us in the world mirror
Life the unknowing
The drum skin stretched across the sphere
The plenitude of species
The niches sought, adapted, filled
The searching relentless
Water, carbon,oxygen, nitrogen,
The family of elements
Morphing through nature in the dance of sunlight
Walking, crawling, creeping, swimming, flying
The silence broken by this orchestra of upstarts
From humble workers through magnificence to us
The consciousness, the cortex
Leaping the firestorm of heartbeats
We, the pharaohs, the fantasy kings and queens
Spreadeagled on the future
Lost and sealed in the pyramid
The brilliant torch bearers
Leading the faltering parade.
167
The Adonis Blue
Belongs to the land,
The rock, fluttering above the chalk
The Adonis Blue fritillary
Blue flor the joy of it
A summer piece of sky
But what an earlier story!
The eggs laid under leaves -
Only the Horsehair Vetch will do -
The caterpillar has a journey
Before the astounding metamorphosis -
Strong enough to overwinter on the Downs
Taken by the ants, buried, protected,
Milked of its sugars, payment for life
And on a glorious day breaks free
Flies to the empyrean
A specialist for the connoisseurs
As long as Emgland stands
An emerald set in a silver sea.
168
The White Stork
Heron-like but not so mournful
And air of purpose, knows its business
Winters in Africa, summers in Europe
Where the huge nests proclaim thriving
Year after year.
Standing four feet high
Quiet, ubiquitous
Tolerates the human habitats
The opportunities
Year after year after year
And on through the centuries.
If the climate holds
If the winds do not rise
To blow those nests to pieces
If the drought does not extend the Sahara
Into Iberia. France, Italy, Greece
And all the islands
All the southern swathes of Rome
They will fly in over Gibraltar and the Bosporus
The way of African invasions
And settle down to husband the lands
Survey the world from dizzying heights
Help grounded humans feel at home.
169
Star-nosed Mole
Living in darkness
A ferocious omnivore
Your hand leads your face
You were born with what
Only elephants can rival
That sensitive snout
You scuttle along
The narrow tunnels, hunting.
When danger threatens
Or earthfall blocks the way
You change to swift reversing
Running boldly backwards
Ruler of a small world
Spooling up the royal progress
Through the passages of night
170
Tiger Beetle
Speed is survival!
But at the cost of frailty?
A dangerous balance!
171
Red Wood Ants
(Inspired by an article in the National Geographic with
superb photographs)
Guardians of the woods!
Builders of air-conditioned nests
Gleaners, recyclers
Immensely powerful
Mandibles, poison defence
Husband sugars, proteins
Colonies of millions
In return for protection
Tend milking parlours
Of captive aphids
Counter pathogens
With poisoned tree resin
Serve the precious queens
In thrall to hyper-females
On whom life depends
172
Daddy Longlegs
Called Daddy Longlegs
Species of understory
One spider, one a
?Harmless forager:
A darker myth of poison
Confuses our picture.
Prevents our question:
For what did such a scaffold
Evolve?
Why so vulnerable,
So prone to disaster
Why their place in the plenitude of life?
173
Honey Buzzard
Accipitridae!
What a grand diversity!
Kites! Vultures! Buzzards!
Those eagle feet, wings!
Even roughened soles of feet -
Common ancestry!
Down the long ages
From dinosaur cousins’ times
The hawks hunt the dead,
The living, eggs, snails,
Even bees and wasps!
The honey buzzard’s feathers
Protect it from stings
Feeding on honey,
Larvae, hymenoptera
Themselves, nips off stings -
Careful precision!
Both the good parents
Nurture the single young
One by precious one
174
Lammergeier Bearded Vulture
Long, patient hours,days,
Soaring above the mountains -
That remains the trick
Lammergeier’s prey
Is not going anywhere.
It just takes finding
Perhaps just for bones
Carried up, dropped onto rocks,
Split for the marrow
A scavenger then
The leavings of the others
Linking the food chain
In flight majestic
Its graceful acrobatics
Dignify the sky
Belie its grim trade
175
MARINE SCORPION
In Jurassic times
An eight-foot scorpion roamed seas
Replete with giants
A cast of actors
Playing out their acts of blood
Their daily business
But were there moments
Of peaceful equilibrium
Balancing the tides,
The flowing of the light
The wind-stirred waves kindly warming
The descending water into night?
Picture a scorpion
Well-defended, armed and armoured
On a day without a fight
176
KRILL
Eco-balancer!
Arbiter of the food chain
Vital cent
This magical shrimp
Conjures the greatest creature
Ever on the planet
Summons the nutrients
From the cold churning waters
Manna for baleen
The ocean's plenty
Sieved from the sunlight
By the seething myriad
cc
pot.com/
My kind, my kin
All our spirit animals
Look at us in the world mirror
Life the unknowing
The drum skin stretched across the sphere
The plenitude of species
The niches sought, adapted, filled
The searching relentless
Water, carbon,oxygen, nitrogen,
The family of elements
Morphing through nature in the dance of sunlight
Walking, crawling, creeping, swimming, flying
The silence broken by this orchestra of upstarts
From humble workers through magnificence to us
The consciousness, the cortex
Leaping the firestorm of heartbeats
We, the pharaohs, the fantasy kings and queens
Spreadeagled on the future
Lost and sealed in the pyramid
The brilliant torch bearers
Leading the faltering parade.
The Adonis Blue
Belongs to the land,
The rock, fluttering above the chalk
The Adonis Blue fritillary
Blue flor the joy of it
A summer piece of sky
But what an earlier story!
The eggs laid under leaves -
Only the Horsehair Vetch will do -
The caterpillar has a journey
Before the astounding metamorphosis -
Strong enough to overwinter on the Downs
Taken by the ants, buried, protected,
Milked of its sugars, payment for life
And on a glorious day breaks free
Flies to the empyrean
A specialist for the connoisseurs
As long as Emgland stands
An emerald set in a silver sea.
The White Stork
Heron-like but not so mournful
And air of purpose, knows its business
Winters in Africa, summers in Europe
Where the huge nests proclaim thriving
Year after year.
Standing four feet high
Quiet, ubiquitous
Tolerates the human habitats
The opportunities
Year after year after year
And on through the centuries.
If the climate holds
If the winds do not rise
To blow those nests to pieces
If the drought does not extend the Sahara
Into Iberia. France, Italy, Greece
And all the islands
All the southern swathes of Rome
They will fly in over Gibraltar and the Bosporus
The way of African invasions
And settle down to husband the lands
Survey the world from dizzying heights
Help grounded humans feel at home.
Star-nosed Mole
Living in darkness
A ferocious omnivore
Your hand leads your face
You were born with what
Only elephants can rival
That sensitive snout
You scuttle along
The narrow tunnels, hunting.
When danger threatens
Or earthfall blocks the way
You change to swift reversing
Running boldly backwards
Ruler of a small world
Spooling up the royal progress
Through the passages of night
Tiger Beetle
Speed is survival!
But at the cost of frailty?
A dangerous balance!
Red Wood Ants
(Inspired by an article in the National Geographic with
superb photographs)
Guardians of the woods!
Builders of air-conditioned nests
Gleaners, recyclers
Immensely powerful
Mandibles, poison defence
Husband sugars, proteins
Colonies of millions
In return for protection
Tend milking parlours
Of captive aphids
Counter pathogens
With poisoned tree resin
Serve the precious queens
In thrall to hyper-females
On whom life depends
Daddy Longlegs
Called Daddy Longlegs
Species of understory
One spider, one a
?Harmless forager:
A darker myth of poison
Confuses our picture.
Prevents our question:
For what did such a scaffold
Evolve?
Why so vulnerable,
So prone to disaster
Why their place in the plenitude of life?
Honey Buzzard
Accipitridae!
What a grand diversity!
Kites! Vultures! Buzzards!
Those eagle feet, wings!
Even roughened soles of feet -
Common ancestry!
Down the long ages
From dinosaur cousins’ times
The hawks hunt the dead,
The living, eggs, snails,
Even bees and wasps!
The honey buzzard’s feathers
Protect it from stings
Feeding on honey,
Larvae, hymenoptera
Themselves, nips off stings -
Careful precision!
Both the good parents
Nurture the single young
One by precious one
Lammergeier Bearded Vulture
Long, patient hours,days,
Soaring above the mountains -
That remains the trick
Lammergeier’s prey
Is not going anywhere.
It just takes finding
Perhaps just for bones
Carried up, dropped onto rocks,
Split for the marrow
A scavenger then
The leavings of the others
Linking the food chain
In flight majestic
Its graceful acrobatics
Dignify the sky
Belie its grim trade
MARINE SCORPION
In Jurassic times
An eight-foot scorpion roamed seas
Replete with giants
A cast of actors
Playing out their acts of blood
Their daily business
But were there moments
Of peaceful equilibrium
Balancing the tides,
The flowing of the light
The wind-stirred waves kindly warming
The descending water into night?
Picture a scorpion
Well-defended, armed and armoured
On a day without a fight
176
KRILL
Eco-balancer!
Arbiter of the food chain
Vital central link
This magical shrimp
Conjures the greatest creature
Ever on the planet
Summons the nutrients
From the cold churning waters
Manna for baleen
The ocean's plenty
Sieved from the sunlight
By the seething myriad
177
Whale? Grey?
(In the North Atlantic they struggle to survive
Like the human warriors of old, few live beyond their thirties.
The average age of the dead adults is 22. Their life expectancy in the South is still in the seventies,where there is less human activity.
Some have always lived to 130, the time it probably takes to live a full cetacean life, to pass on accumulated wisdom.
I don't have to tell you why this is happening - I think you know. Do they? We don't know, but on one level I believe they do.)
Bereft of elders
Struggling against extinction
Their songs diminished
Across the oceans
The planet once resounded
With joyous witness
Their boundless presence
Threaded down the sealanes
They rang the timeless changes
In the great belfries of time.
178
RAVEN
Taking their chances
Members of a dazzling clan
Corvids networking
Of opportunists
Putting their formidable
Beaks in our business
Living on the edge
And parallel alongside us,
Noisy, ubiquitous
Yet solitary
Cloaked in mystery
Darkly formidable
Icons of landscape
Sharp-eyed, alien, aloof
Raven (Part Two)
Odin sent Hugin
Thought and Munin Memory
To the ends of Earth
His reconnaissance
To gather the whisperings
Of the livelong day
Appraising the gods
He filtered the raw data
Or was it so raw?
Hugin and Munin
Sitting quiet, inscrutable
On his high shoulder
Their “Raven’s Knowledge”
For the Irish is as deep
Unfathomable
As the great grey seas
Around their precious island,
Swiftly taken in
While far to the west
Ravens fill mythologies
Creation to End
Sitting in judgment
Cloaked in glorious black robes
On the Ravenstone
Raven (Part Three)
On the western plains
Before we poisoned the wolves
Three species flourished
Buffalo! Wolves, ravens
Took care of the herbivores
As they sickened, died
Millions of buffalo!
Thousands of wolves left their feasts
For the raven flocks
After the ravens others
In the millions, billions
Complete the food chain
Grass to ravens, then
The rhythm accelerated
Ravens to microbes
But we laid poison
The wolves died in their thousands
The ravens picked over
Survivors moved on.
That ecosystem collapsed
The ravens regrouped.
Raven (Part Four)
Tough survivors then
By the sea,the open land, woods -
All places we met
Even the high arctic
The bleak stony northern shores
The tundra, woods’ edge
No wonder they came,
Haunted the battlefields
Searched the lands for death
So why are they there,
In stories of creation,
Always in the cast?
Why was one sent out
After the Flood, over the waters,
Endless horizon?
Before the dove one was,
And back, and back, to early times,
To first creation.
And why the trickster?
Is it the glint in knowing eyes,
Sense of deja vu?
They always with us
Always looking over us,
Over our shoulders?
Without them we’re blind,
As reliant as Odin,
No depth perception
We always have known,
Always that we needed you,
That you made us whole
That we could not be
Wholly separate, distinct
From lines stretching back
Millions of years.
You contrive to be alien,
Mysterious kin.
On the pristine world
Nature’s black calligraphy
Writes the book of life
You summon shivers
Down my spine as you fly close
And leave me bereft
As you fade from view
Elude my scant perception,
Bank, disappear.
179
Surinam Toad
A toad’s a frog for a’ that
But this one’s it’s own self -
Powerful webbed feet, strong slender hands
A ravenous omnivore
Dominates its waters
Acrobatic mating
Many somersaults to quicken eggs
Sow them on her back in cells -
Months of growth ensue -
They hatch as miniatures, complete
180
O Mighty House Mouse!
Our distribution “Worldwide”
We meek inherit
The Mus Musculus!
Our empire “Ubiquitous”
Humanity’s sphere
Discreet amid the wealth
We patiently gnaw
In houses, barns, store-houses
Rapid generations
Unstoppable tide of life
Cousins, ancestors
Emerging through the ruined dinosaur bones, the smoking
Wrecks of forests,
Creating new chains
Of plants sustaining mammals
Noble predators
Dependent in their turn
On us, our never-failing
Humble foundation
Our solid success
Repeating through the ages
Constant beating hearts.
Romans saw muscles
“Little mice” run under skin,
Saw tendons mouse tails
Now muscle-power
Embedded in the language
Belongs to us, the Mus!
181
Surinam Toad
A toad’s a frog for a’ that
But this one’s it’s own self -
Powerful webbed feet, strong slender hands
A ravenous omnivore
Dominates its waters
Acrobatic mating
Many somersaults to quicken eggs
Sow them on her back in cells -
Months of growth ensue -
They hatch as miniatures, complete
182
Ten Frogs - an introduction
(I have decided to honor ten species of frogs in a linked series of short poems -)
The frogs spread over the world
Of wet warm places, dangerous predarors,
A multitude of bit players
Taking their chances, jumping into niches
Working pieces of the great puzzle -
Species spanning complex rainforest,
More gentle temperate zones. English country,
Personal ponds in leaves on high
Swampy ground, winter-frozen, slow to wake,
Boisterous choruses on spring trees,
Sized from dinner-plates to babies' fingernails
From emphatic boasters to modest hiding mouthfuls
Survivors of great mounds of spawn laid down in hope -
All under threat now, in our careless hands,
How many still with us next century
As the world simplifies, those niches dry away?
183
OPAH
A balanced beauty
Fair creature of compromise
'twixt sun and darkness
A toothless predator
Knowing its chosen place
The centre of things
Riding even waters
184
Tunicate Sea Squirt
Sometimes wicked urges
To anthropomorphize beasts
Can't be resisted:
The sea squirt searches
For its right home in the world
Then eats its own brain
Did I too need brains
To settle in Tamworth NH,
Pull up the drawbridge?
It seemed the right thing
At the time, oh, yes for sure -
The woods were calling,
Democracy flourished
Apparently, the people
Wonderfully mixed,
With decent spaces
Between for me to slip through
And settle my brain,
Maybe cook a feast
Or perhaps marinade it
For future banquets -
185
Giant Clam
In ocean shallows
Enormous clams filter slow waters
Decades of patient growth
Through rhythmic seasons
Speck by speck, minerals, nutrients
Pearls of infinite price
-Neocaridina denticulata denticulata (Red Cherry Shrimp)
Denticulata!
With little teeth - say it again!
Out-perform great fangs
Tending the garden -
Establishes a food chain
Benign, built to last
A small shrimpy world
That cuts our vain ambition
Down to cosmic size
187
On turning to the natural world while remembering Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings"
MANTA RAY
Gandalf was rescued
BY a graceful giant eagle
He rode to safety
Down the long ages
Only pterosaurs could rise
To such heroic feats
And yet there are wings
This workaday world today,
Epic, could save us
A living life-raft
The magic carpet of the seas
Cruises the wide ocean:
The mighty manta!
Whose shadowing overstory
Gives our fables lift
And in the true now
The spirit of the waters
Plays its deeper part
--
--188
The Arabian Toad-headed Agamid.
A sandy lizard,
Arabian toad-headed agamid
Lives so modestly
Survives underground
Burying or tunnelling
To cope with desert heat
Long legs made for speed
Its tail signals defiance
To be reckoned with
Scant vittles suffice
For this creature beating odds
That most would decline
An occasional hawk
Appearing from nowhere sky
Fulfils the ancient myth
Of vengeance from on high.
189
The Birth of Greenland Sharks
Sometime Greenland sharks
Decided to keep their eggs
Inside their svelte lines
Until the young, born live
Swan out to take their chances:
One egg solution.
A challenge for sharks
And many other species:
Where should eggs hatch?
Should young emerge complete
From guarded nests or burrows
Protected or abandoned?
Or should the weight of birth
Suffered in darkness, held within
Lighten into triumph?
:
190
Walrus
Mighty pinniped!
So much at ease diving deep
Rooting the seabed
Arctic icon then,
Extreme adapted mammal
Evolved for cold water
Dry land for mating
Heaving blustering male giants
Hauled up on the rocks
What consciousness?
The long seasons' swings
The slow gifts of day, night...
191
(This poem is not done, but I need more time to reflect. I am also aware that there is another poem of the same name that is very famous (and good!), although very different. Ah well.).
Raven (Part One)
We attend, Raven
To your emphatic presence
Your grand assertion
Yet how much really
Do we glean from chance sightings
Of your stark doings?
We see you aloft
A pirouetting trio
What interaction
Are we witnessing?
What patterns? Calligraphy?
Communication?
Our understanding
Of such a complex species
Begins with black birds
Of glossy beauty
Running spirals around us
Omnivorously
Taking their chances
Members of a dazzling clan
Corvids networking
Of opportunists
Putting their formidable
Beaks in our business
Living on the edge
And parallel alongside us,
Noisy, ubiquitous
Yet solitary
Cloaked in mystery
Darkly formidable
Icons of landscape
Sharp-eyed, alien, aloof
Raven (Part Two)
Odin sent Hugin
Thought and Munin Memory
To the ends of Earth
His reconnaissance
To gather the whisperings
Of the livelong day
Appraising the gods
He filtered the raw data
Or was it so raw?
Hugin and Munin
Sitting quiet, inscrutable
On his high shoulder
Their “Raven’s Knowledge”
For the Irish is as deep
Unfathomable
As the great grey seas
Around their precious island,
Swiftly taken in
While far to the west
Ravens fill mythologies
Creation to End
Sitting in judgment
Cloaked in glorious black robes
On the Ravenstone
Raven (Part Three)
On the western plains
Before we poisoned the wolves
Three species flourished
Buffalo! Wolves, raven
Took care of the herbivores
As they sickened, died
Millions of buffalo!
Thousands of wolves left their feasts
For the raven flocks
After the ravens others
In the millions, billions
Complete the food chain
Grass to ravens, then
The rhythm accelerated
Ravens to microbes
But we laid poison
The wolves died in their thousands
The ravens picked over.
Survivors moved on.
That ecosystem collapsed.
The ravens regrouped.
Raven (Part Four)
Survivors then,
By the sea,the open land, woods -
Places we met them
Even the high arctic
The bleak stony northern shores
The tundra, woods’ edge
No wonder they came,
Haunted the battlefields
Searched the lands for death
So why are they there,
In stories of creation,
Always in the cast?
Why was one sent out
After the Flood, over the waters,
Endless horizon?
Before the dove one was,
And back, and back, to early times,
To first creation.
Any why the trickster?
Is it the glint in knowing eyes,
Sense of deja vu?
They always with us
Always looking over us,
Over our shoulders?
Without them we’re blind,
As reliant as Odin,
No depth perception
We always have known,
Always that we needed you,
That you made us whole
That we could not be
Wholly separate, distinct
From lines stretching back
Millions of years.
You contrive to be alien,
Mysterious kin.
On the pristine world
Nature’s black calligraphy
Writes the book of life
You summon shivers
Down my spine as you fly close
And leave me bereft
As you fade from view
Elude my scant perception,
Bank, disappear.
Deep Ocean Octopus
(We don't know how many species there are)
Everything a slow
Fierce life and death struggles
In utter darkness
She sits, guards her eggs
Fights the crabs surrounding her
No respite, no food
For five years she fades
Keeps her babies safe: they hatch
She gives up her life
Herpale ghost drifts
In the long, languid curren
Her triumph complete
193
Seychelles Frog
She, human princess
Might kiss a ballroom full of princes
And never find a single one to match
The noble Seychelles frog
A natural king of fatherhood
Beyond all human scope -
The male Seychelles frog
Must fertilize the eggsDeep in mossy forest
Guard them with his life
But then - true dedication! -
Raise tadpoles on his back
Puts them in the water
Only for adolescence
And final parting
So every inch a prince!
A shining paragon
Barely one inch long
194
Gourami
emove label Inbox from this conversation
The male gourami
Has major child care to do -
Makes a bubble nest,
Blows eggs in gently,
Guards the children with his life
Breathes air for the work
And for survival
As well as the normal gills
For use everyday
How did this evolve,
This life of arduous challenge?
Eminent design?
Tuatara
The last of your kind
An ancient lineage, reptile
Yet active in cold
Survivors till now
Outliers in New Zealand
Links to times before
Dinosaurs, back to
Turtles, crabs,fossils from seas
When the lands themselves
Were different, stranger.
You lived through mass extinction:
Will you burrow now?
-- | Sun, Nov 10, 2024, 3:23 PM
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Stands magnificent
Wavering at the edge of change
On shrinking ice
Under the arctic sky
A creature of the surface
Defying the deep
Patiently endures
The purgatory of swimming
Haunting the future
Short-tailed Pygmy Tyrant
Survived a million years
The short-tailed Pygmy Tyrant
Minds its business
A thumb's length, vehement
A fletchling arrowed through time
Earnest, emphatic
Dancing mote of dust
Perfected, miniature
At piece with the forest
I often dream of Gorillas, and twicie in my life have had memorable episodes with silverbacks in London and LA zoos.
This is dedicated to Esther - and you, although I know you relate more completely to other cousins..
I think particularly of the constant watch the silvferbacks keep on the whole tribe...
Richard
GORILLA
I am the father
Of the band,the silver-back
The mighty presence
Together we move
Slowly through the gathering light
Sweeping with one gaze
Holding with a glance
The rhythm of survival
Patterns of scatter
Tactics of our kin
The spell spreading through the dawn
Making the world ours
Barbastelle (Bats)
A distinctive species:Hibernates deep in dry caves
Segregates in colonies
The mothers separating
For summers only:
What benefits the males?
Fish-eating Rat
What pressing danger
Or desperate starvation
Drove you off the bank,
Abandon dry ground
Take to the hostile waters
Dive into risk for dear life?
Your feet betray you,
Changing slowly over time -
Creature of the earth,
Following beavers,
Otters, hippos, seals, whales
Evolutions twists and turns
Funnel-web spider
Mature male spiders
Venture out, questing for mates
Maximize venom -
Predators beware!
Chemicals intensify
- Just a means to survive.
| Sat, May 11, 2024, 3:46 PM
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In the Tidal Zone - the Sand Crabs
The strength of water
Sculpting long ages of stone
The patience of deep time
Above, the air dances
In the light, day, night,
Its fragile tip-toe
Centuries swinging
On moon-held hinges, the sweep
Of giant steps, back and forth.
Of all the creatures
The littoral acolytes
The crabs catch the eye
Entranced in the dance
Out of the sand they climb,
Bask in the air, seize the day,
Quiet moments of stasis,
The pendulum's pause in its swing.
Pipistrelle
A mouse with wings hangsHigh in the roof of the barn
Falls through the darkness
As to the naming
Perhaps all earthbound cousins
Should be "wingless mice"
Pipistrelle
A mouse with wings hangsHigh in the roof of the barn
Falls through the darkness
As to the naming
Perhaps all earthbound cousins
Should be "wingless mice"
--Pipistrelle
A mouse with wings hangsHigh in the roof of the barn
Falls through the darkness
As to the naming
Perhaps all earthbound cousins
Should be "wingless mice"
--Pipistrelle
A mouse with wings hangsHigh in the roof of the barn
Falls through the darkness
As to the naming
Perhaps all earthbound cousins
Should be "wingless mice"
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--Tenrecs of Madagaskar
In a two hundredth
Of the Universe's time
Rising from ruin
We modest mammals
Rarely glimpsed the blue sky
Kept our heads down
So all hail, cousins!
Hard-scrabble improvisors
Adaptable tenrecs!
Taking their chances
As long as their hands of cards
Keep them in the game
--
