Unhindered by birds or stars, hawks fly over the sky.
In his fanciful glades, pursuing a fog growing heavier.
A cloud, he realizes, will fall in an unfathomable spot.
Thunder rumbles afar away, and my heart skips a beat.
The mists are moving toward the stirring leaves.
The mountains are also home to young and ibex.
Nothing isolates us from the everlasting cloud.
Where the water fills parched rural areas and hearts.
Written: July 20, 2021
~12000 BC Sabre Tooth Tiger
~ 1650 BC Mammoth
1681 Dodo
~ 1890 Falkland Islands Wolf
1918 Carolina Parakeet
1938 Schomburgk's Deer
~ 1960 Javan Tiger
1973 Tecopa Pupfish
1975 Round Island Burrowing Boa
1979 Dutch Alcon Blue Butterfly
1994 Golden Toad
2000 Pyrenean Ibex
2002 Baiji White Dolphin
2004 Black-faced Honeycreeper
2006 West African Black Rhino
2015 Pinta Island Tortoise
20?? H0m0 Sapiens
The Dune on the Rock
where fine grains of time
gradually slip
revealing footprints
of lost vertebrates:
an archaic
human being -
Neanderthal;
red deer, aurochs
elephants
and ibex…
crumbling sand
unveils
extinct
past
------------------------------
Contest: Pick a Title Vol 12
Diminished Hexaverse
Sponsor: Edward Ibeh
Title: Gibraltar Crumbling
19th December 2019
A potatoe cake bathing with an onion ring is an iconic sealed ring in a genuine abyss of calm. But an abyss is neither an abbot nor an abbess. For pretty tunnels created in a monastery clap link out to wave wreathed gardens bursting with hue and fauna. So a garland weave can be made into the form of a forty thousand foot ibex. And this can be achieved quite quickly. By placing bees in soldier lines. That normally has the desired effect. Oh wow. A little bean with a fruit cup is arriving. Look how sparkly the costume is. Lovely lingering linguistic lounging linking. And a stick smiling from an antique wooden chair in a mountain forest haze. Hahaha raisins racing radishes. Hahah pointed playing field. Xxxxx intellectuality z
You Texas Cuspidata!
Not you, and not a curse:
Taxus cuspidata, for Japanese Yew!
So, don’t confuse a plant with the Ibex
Ilex serrata – that’s Christmas Holly
Or Japanese Winterberry
Butterflies, butternuts, a Buttinsky?
Shut your eyes, it’s Conocarpus erectus
(Pastor here is only saying "Buttonwood" in Latin)
Meanwhile in nature, the pines of Japan
Are dwarfed like bottled thunder:
Pinus thunbergiana
The Christmas Spirit is perennial in China (?)
Schinus terebinthifolius
(Again, Latin for another plant: Christmasberry)
Try to bonsai gladly;
A creeper in your home or villa;
Haha! Bourgainvillea glabra
My dad called this beauty, Pride of India!
Myrtle set me right, but India won at the end:
Laegerstroemia indica
Neighbors, boyhood buddies, international relations?
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry? No plant connection:
Just Hackberry named Celtis sinensis
(c) Modified 20170417, Deo. This poem was previously published in my book in 2005 (UnAmerican Education: Poetry and Politics, by Red Lead Press)
Are you the Aphrodite of the Greek tales
Or the Artemis who admirers drooling sent?
No, for Aphrodite had her little flaws
And Artemis the fortunes of Orion bent.
Nor are you the stunning star that the Magi led.
For the over-told story of the Magi is as old as dirt
But your drowsy rounded eyes look so cunning fresh;
The kind of tools that the will men pervert.
The famous Ishtar cannot be your match
For she lured with looks in order to kill;
And Inanna may have tried to rival you a bit
Had she not given in to Dumuzi’s antique skill.
And tired of prating about deities, I now must say I love you.
I know that time is so much gone, and so is my chance;
The remote luck I thought I stood some years gone
Must now be as extinct as the Pyrenean Ibex of ancient France.
Nosy bird says you vowed holy nuptials yesteryear,
Iron twines that a luck-loving man must never sever.
Yet can I ever lose you without losing all breath,too?
Do I toy with the time-oiled vice that damns forever?
(African populations are being killed off by war,
famine, disease, and neglect...when will we try to help them?)
Time,
stretching out, encompasses curtains,
on distant savannas, of shimmering heat.
And animals vanish:
ibex and antelope; elephant; grouse.
Here once, now going or gone.
Time vanishes now.
Moldering greenery, mute,
moves mainly in wind --
pliant life, submitting to breezes,
passive in sun. Rooted in spots
not chosen or won.
Plants may not vanish;
they prosper.
We do not prosper.
We vanish, as animal;
some go hardly noticed.
A dirge, as animals vanish:
we vanish unnoticed.
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