The Leonine Insects Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They are selling everything half priced and the busy
Nurses have their backs pressed against the coral castles,
Their lips pressed like flowers drying in a book
By the men they have healed
At the business end of this peninsula—across this almost
Sunken field—
Where the cypress grow like maidens bowing in green semicircles,
With the herons like gawky angels overhead—
With the airplanes disappearing into surreptitious triangles
Where the mermaids fused from monkeys and blue gills
Suppose that all must disappear:
The evaporates of ice-cream underneath even the most
Propitious of mountains—
As the leonine insects yawn underfoot in the sunshine of their
Sandy pits.