Madagascar! Poem by gershon hepner

MADAGASCAR!


In Madagascar, bad boys are not crocodiles
with underwater armor and enormous jaws
which cockroaches avoid, despite their cunning wiles,
by hiding in decaying baobabs, indoors.
The lemurs do not seem to mind the fossas, and
the spiny-tailed iguanas do not bother them,
and radiated tortoises all understand
that all must share the habitat. And yet mayhem
is threatened by a predator. You surely can,
without me telling, guess who this must be. In case
you cannot, I will spell it out for you: it’s man,
destroying habitat so he can pave the place,
transforming it like other lands that he’s subdued,
fulfilling Genesis 1: 28, he thinks,
removing from the world its great infinitude
of species with which we’ll no more have interlinks.

6/20/08