Poetry

Come and rap with me, the amazing axolotl,
we can rap a little or rap A LOTTLE!
I’m the larval stage of a salamander,
but I don’t want to change and climb on your veranda,
for I’m telling you now, with no ifs or maybes,
we need no adult form for us to have babies.We have gills and six tentacles which waft around our head,
our tentacles have tentacles, purple, brown or pink or red.
We have a broad head, four legs and a tail
and a superpower that’s been rarely known to fail,
if we lose a limb or tail to a predator’s bite
we can grow that bit again and set ourselves right.

I’m not just a smiley face and a four-footed dancer,
I’m helping science find a cure for cancer,
for my superpower of regeneration
could help humans grow back limbs after amputation.
Come and rap with me, the amazing axolotl,
we can rap it slowly or go FULL THROTTLE!

Let me tell you one thing that really gets me riled,
axolotls are nearly extinct in the wild.
We come from the lakes of central Mexico,
but home to those lakes we cannot go,
>for you humans have made an unwelcome contribution
to our near extinction through expansion and pollution,

and you’ve introduced carp and tilapia fish.
Won’t you fish those monsters out and put them on a dish?
>Come and rap with me, the amazing axolotl,
we can rap a little or rap A LOTTLE!
People may need permits to keep me in Australia
to prevent yet another ecological failure.

Setting me free would earn you no praise
for I’d endanger native critters in your waterways
slurping fish, worms and insects without distinction,
like tilapia and carp, I’d drive others to extinction.
Come an rap with me, the amazing axolotl,
we can rap it slowly or go FULL THROTTLE

I’ll stay safe in a tank, but don’t put me in a bottle,
I’m a critically endangered AMAZING AXOLOTL.

 
Kayaking Captain Cook Creek, I still my paddle blades
to approach a flotilla of swans
and an Oxbridge syllogism
fills the dripping pause,

All swans are white,
these birds are swans,
these swans, therefore, are white.

The black feathers which float before me
flout the northern premise of the dons.
I hunch to glide beneath a bridge’s concrete pillars.
Dodging fishing lines,  my thoughts reel in platelets of a time
which bleeds down from Mount Cook and Mount Mangana:
men in buttoned coats and breeches scooping
water from this creek, ringing the woods with iron axes,
blazing pademelons with muzzle loaders;
and the Nuenone standing witness to a singular event
which turned antipodean logic on its head:

All men are black
these strangers are men,
these men, therefore, are …

Beige as cowries?
Pink, puce and blue as sunset?
Ash white as revenant ancestors?

Children splash and squeal in the curling fringe of ocean,
blessed and cursed with scant rememberings of Truganini
surviving her first horror.

Swans quiver, flap wings, blow bugle beaks,
trundle the creek mouth in a gawky lift off to an airborne arrowing,
then they dip and settle, feather-soft yet wary,
further out upon the sun-shocked bay.