Poetry for Animals
Wee Willie
Wee Willie Wagtail;
Perched high in the whistling wattle,
within the winding wood down the way.
See Whimsical Willie wag his tail;
Sporting a white waistcoat,
which he wears proudly
night and day.
Watch Wee Willie Wagtail whirl and whirl;
His black and white plumage on display.
See Wee Willie wait on a wire;
Greet the passers-by with fanfare,
within the winding wood down the way.
Now Willie is waging war with the warblers,
and with watchful eyes here he will stay.
Wee Willie Wagtail;
Perched high in the whistling wattle,
within the winding wood down the way.
The Song of Tanchōzuru
How I have longed to be
a red-crowned crane.
To live for a thousand years;
See a world of beauty
through a drop of falling rain.
To wade in a golden
river of mist;
Soar through an endless azure sky,
When the snow is falling softly,
over fields and mountains high.
And when the day draws softly close,
and the season’s end is nigh;
I pray to the winged gods above:
Let us live freely, you and I.
So, we became snow ballerinas.
Adrift in a sea of powdered white, we dance.
We make fire on the breath of gods.
Blue Whale’s Lament
There was a song passed
down to me from hidden
tales of lore.
Of 1000 years of solitude and eternal longing
lapping the shore.
It was a tale of 1001
perilous seas;
A sorrowful piece
playing over a mid-Atlantic breeze.
Now, under a nocturne of a blood red moon;
I hear his sorry tune;
Picture his mottled hue;
Through a vastness of oceans before;
Across an expanse of azure blue.
And when the tide is low,
And the evening is nigh;
In an abandoned shipyard of broken dreams,
You may hear a moan; or a guttural cry.
This is his lament.
For he is the loneliest
whale in the ocean.
The big boy; the big blue.
Feathered Fowl
There you go again,
dear hen.
Fleet-footed and unfettered.
Forever foraging your way
into my bespeckled heart.
I ask of ye, feathered fowl. Peck me here,
Peck me now.
Through scattered seed
my heart doth avow.
For there is many a pleasure in earth’s
godly delights;
Or even a worm or two
Entanglement
One dewy dawn I met
an orb-weaver spider,
who had woven words as
weapons into her web.
‘I am the master’ – it said.
Alas, I retired to my bed.
In my dreams I saw evil spiders,
plotting to take over the world as geometricians, engineers and craftsmen (one thread at a time).
I woke from my slumber to
find a new sign:
“This isn’t Charlotte’s Web” it read.
I fell over and hit my head
(the weaver just watched as it bled).
Eventually, I decided it was time-
to redefine our relationship (and
I would soon intertwine
my reality with hers).
“Why, you spin your silk so fast….
how long does it last?”
and the orb-weaver continued to spin in circles;
an unbridled dancer of the night.
Simple messages soon turned into multi-layered networks of concealed weaponry and word wizardry.
Never had I seen an acrobat defy such feats of gravity!
At 3.00 I found a silken heart on my pillow,
interlaced with gold specks from spinnerets,
and in true zigzag form:
it had blown in on a gentle breeze.
Did she wish to entangle my heart?
As fond of her as I had become,
She was getting a rather big head,
as I awoke to find a new thread,
with a flailing creature on the radial axes:
“This is my design” – behold the criminal mind!
(This was more than entrapment).
Never had I been so enraptured –
or she had positively captured –
both my curiosity and heart.
But I found the web abandoned in lonely May,
enmeshed in urban decay,
threads hanging and exposed.
The master never ate her own craft.
Still, I smiled. Someone out there
she was weaving her way into
someone’s else’s heart.
A game of entanglement.
Summer of the Cicada
It was the summer I wept over lost love and life.
The summer of harsh discontent.
The summer I existed on minimum threads.
But this year, the cicadas are louder than ever.
For most, life within these wailing city walls
drowns out their cacophony.
But I hear their deafening tune.
For it is a battle cry I’ve heard before.
It’s a world of broken dreams and promises.
It’s an earth that continues to bleed raw.
Outside, dusk approaches.
The cicadas continue to buzz,
pulling me from the debris of my silentreverie.
Their chorus reaches its final crescendo.
I hear them say:
We have crawled out of hellish earth to be here.
We will not be silenced anymore.
In this short life, we will be heard.
Let us live loudly or let us not live at all.
So, I rise. I face the universe.
I prepare for the Second Coming.