Nature Poems
Poem of the Week for March 25th 2008
Mimic. Animals Mimic Animals
As I was lying in a hammock on a starlit night, the Aegean Sea only a few metres away, the looming form of Turkey’s Mount Olympos a God-like presence in the milky-way-lit sky, nature’s chorus erupted. What I had partly known yet been only vaguely aware of, suddenly became exquisitely, sometimes amusingly, and startlingly clear: Nature mimics, remarkably, itself.
Mimic. Animals Mimic Animals
Goats
Render the muelling
Human infant’s cry
Immaculately:
“Mummy come to me!”
Emergency;
Urgency
Arrogant peacocks
Leap the Evolutionary Gorge
To become loud
Sad cats
Mewelling;
Frogs
tender for first prize,
Becoming weak barking dogs
Yuck, yuck, yucking
At many private Universal Jokes,
Oiking the limey barrow-boys’ call,
Quacking better than ducks,
Herding together
To better the incohate
Mutterings and mumblings
Of the
Non-common
Non-sense
Of the House of Commons,
Yep, yep, yepping
To any and every
Inane or nane motion-
Squelching sound;
Dogs mimic dogs;
Cats are drills;
Horses fathom denial;
Eagles preordained
Senna’s death-screeching tyres;
The owl allowed
to copy the question
Of personal identification;
The snake
Preordained
The song
Of punctured inner tubes;
Snoozing
We copy the bee;
Cows nearly made it
To the Moon;
Ducks copied frogs;
Whales thundered
The message
To Bach
That we should create organs;
We with our flutes
Copied the nightingales;
Every chick
Of every bird
Copied its Maester-Singer;
Did the cricket
Copy the pizzicato violin?
Or the violin
the cricket?;
The wolf and the coyote
With their extended yowl
Copied,
with lengthening,
the owl;
The scimitarred pig
Squeals the screeching
Of steel on steel;
The warthog
Grunts the sound
of human
in extremus
Chicken chicks
Warn
of Fagin
and of
Scrooge;
The frogs come back
and croak their approval
“’Ear, ‘ear, ‘ear”;
Crickets rub their legs
To chirp
Like the throats
of song-birds;
Parrots
Immaculatel
y
Parrot;
Mosquitos taught the arrow;
missile;
Hares the drum;
Rattle snakes
the Brazilian Caramba;
Tigers the continuation
into a smooth drone
Of the human throat’s
Glottal
Death-Rattle;
The lion mimics,
And makes him jealous by improvement,
Thor’s Thunder;
Budgerigars
mimic the cooing of doves
That we mimic
Cooing, loving, cooing
Hyenas hilariously
Canadian geese copy,
purify,
Avianify
the grunt of the swine;
Butterflies
Mimic the sight
of myriad
Fractured-wave
Sea-shattered
Kaleidoscopic Light;
Sea Horses
Feel an Oceanic Need
to Flower
Into Unseen
Sea
Weed;
Mountains echo;
Chameleons mimic
Earth Wood Stone;
The Cuttle Fish
fractures it skin’s light
Shuttles it
into the mirror of
the rainbow-mottled ocean floor;
A flower
Mimics
The Lady Wasp’s
Labia,
And holds the male
In her thrall:
All
Copy Cats!
Poem of the Week
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