7pm, 31st DECEMBER 2022
A new years eve day of sorts
Admonishes the blink-and-you-miss-it sun’s impertinent lightness.
The last day
Looks much like the ancient days stretching back and forwards
yet winks to freshness,
life’s chapters churn.
A brittle break,
the new year jumps in military precision, stands to attention
beckoning, like always -
Fulsome Life is all to play for.
LOST MADAGASCAN SOLITUDE
Sloping crystalline falling away skies
nudge a luxuriant forested isle - wide-eyed tree-skipping lemur-strewn -
obediently it slides eastward, ever further distant from anchoring shores.
A boat-less earth.
Hunched up blood-licking apes locked into fruit-held rift valleys.
Sharpening their flints.
The sautéing sifaka, jitters, nervy, princely pirouettes.
Esoteric treasure trove, trust-bound,
assembled exotica anciently unfolds.
In solitude, a jolly party contained together in pacific balance:
reptilian bug-eyed chameleons sure and slow-footed,
shy slinking Fossa, a lone long-fingered aye-aye absentmindedly
tapping out dangerous omens in primeval morse code.
Waves crash, anguished howls -
one rogue boatful with hungry bellies and hatchets.
Chameleons adjust multi-coloured jackets
- to hide away fast.
The island’s grizzled chains slip their moorings
grind down Noah’s Ark of charms.
Axes sear, slice, ricochet
Malagasy’s pristine wonders slump - wounded, bloodied, defiled.
The world’s fourth largest isle,
once tree carpeted now down to rubbed raw floor boards.
PORTUGUESE SEAHORSE (long-snouted) LIVING ON THE EDGE
A sea creature, to cradle, adore -
escorting its life mate across millennial seascapes.
A bobbing coquettishness
Swimming awkwardly in Algarvian currents.
Horse-tails like baby-hands reach out for Neptune’s parental comforts,
wrapping around gentle swaying seagrasses.
A delicate dance and exchange of your 400 young;
Your once-in-a-life-time long-snouted mate, with ultimate fatherly caresses.
The collection of all the Silvery tears
can’t compensate for Anthropocene encroachments:
An ocean of plasticity, rapacious ripping fishing nets.
A screen-based sea of humanity’s unkindness.
Snouts snuffling, a scorched earth tribe,
A noisy distracted indifference:
Your impending homelessness
Your offsprings’ melancholic fears.
New Gods empty out the seas
Ladling in their toxicity and carelessness:
A seagrass meadow depletion
Your cherished young rendered fatherless.
Published: https://branchesabound.blogspot.com/2023/01/portuguese-seahorse-long-snouted-living.html