34.
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
35.
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
36.
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
37.
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
38.
On The Edge - Thr 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
39,
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
40.
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
