Karla Linn Merrifield

Plastidon inexpectatus
In Six Mile Cypress Slough

The skink emerges slowly, red nose, 
red throat,  but like five-lined thunder
on a log, squatting low, throbbing
lizard of a poem, five-lined,
red, red, read of the spawn, this thunder.
 
© 2013 Karla Linn Merrifield

Found:

Flocking dowitchers, one marbled godwit
pausing now on spring migration’s curve
to feast on briny mudflats before tundra
breeding grounds summon them to a poem,
its migrating pauses, its wingèd lines, its curve.
 
© 2013 Karla Linn Merrifield

Reptile House Poem

I’ve got lizards, many lizards.
It’s Florida, after all.

Anoles green and brown, mottled fence
lizards, and the not-lizard, five-lined

Caloosahatcee skink? Totemic after all.

 
© 2013 Karla Linn Merrifield

A Fragile Defiance

Bristlecone centuries hold steady
against the mania of control.
Millennia of marble, granite, gold,
the silver eons of uncontrollable erosion,
submit to the mind of wind and ice.

*For Roberta Moore

with a line from Robert McGinty’s “A Chaos of Contingencies”

 
© 2013 Karla Linn Merrifield

A Little Poetry

Promote Your Page Too

BACK TO VORACIOUS VERSES