[stylist] Poem - "Frogs" - Finalish Draft

[Jackie Williams]

Bill,
I once vowed I would answer a poem with a poem. Here is mine. The intense
rhyme will irritate those who do not favor rhymed poetry.
By the way, yours was powerful in both the emotion and regret.

I Fight for Little Things

A world of rainbows, mackerel skies, cloud-reaching trees-
they mesmerize like shorelines tracing restless seas.
We soar with birds, and seek rare flowers, follow bees.
Our world lights up with babies' smiles that give us ease.

It is not good enough. We're busy killing frogs.
Imagine for a moment stillness on those logs
where, she, a creature living in the forest bogs
deposits all her eggs, cocooned by misty fogs.

A noose, man's greed, is slipped around her pulsing gut-
delivers her to some fat, pompous, gourmand's glut. 
Those frog legs, caviar, rare truffles, and-now what! 
With her absorptive skin she takes in toxins-smut
 
to tadpoles metamorphosing in waters, cool
and clear. They do not know the bottom of the pool
is laced with chemicals that mutilate and fool
this species-unimportant to our human rule.

Our global warming does not make us more aware
of frogs, their eggs, or if the tadpoles have a prayer
in sizzling temperatures gone wrong, polluted air,
and fading ecosystems dying everywhere.

The pristine habitat now rare throughout their world
has fed an ugly fungus where the tadpoles swirled.
While slowly, transformation to a frog unfurled-
just eighteen days and then to death they whirled.

In city smog and forest bog our fates are crossed.
Yet she is me and I am her. I fear we're lost.

Our futures, stretched too thin-in carelessness-are tossed
to unimportant values.
Worlds could burn or frost. 


I have just submitted this to the League of Minnesot poetry contest.

Jackie Lee

Time is the school in which we learn.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz	 


-----Original Message-----
From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of William L
Houts via stylist
Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2015 6:55 AM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Cc: William L Houts
Subject: [stylist] Poem - "Frogs" - Finalish Draft



Good Morning, Droogies,

I wrote this a little while ago, but hadn't posted it until now. This 
one's still kind of painful, as it refers to an event from my teen years 
which I have yet to llive down entirely.  I feel pretty good about this 
one, as it's gone through many drafts and I've finally punched it into a 
shape I can bear without wincing.  As always, your mileage may vary.

--Bill


---


*Frogs *

Small as infant toes, the frogs

enlivened smiling sandss, so close

to oceans helix deep. They swarmed the grains,

that hopper tribe, like Greeks

besieging Troy, though not so fierce.

and Then come  I:

an anguished boy enshrilled

by growing-juice, and infant slights

and rage, that demon muse.

I plowed them down,  that day of wrath,

bestormed those tiny lives,and neither grieved,

nor prayed, nor wept a blackened tear.

I've staggered years this infant crime

while Friends suggest I'm clean and not so lost:

and yet I bear a holocaust.












-- 


"Oh, Sophie!  Whyfore have you eated all de cheeldren?"

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