Dugongs Drowsing, Browsing And Snoozing In Berlin’s Other Zoo Poem by C Richard Miles

Resembling sundry submerged submarines
Sunbathing in seaweed-bound Sargasso sea,
Massed massive manatees munched morosely,
Stalking swirling, swarming swathes
Of wasted, wet, wrecked waterweeds
Carousing with carefully cavorting currents
In the tank, that arcane, aquatic amphitheatre
Belonging to Berlin’s other zoo.

Like useless, ugly. unwanted U-boats,
The dozing, drowsing dugongs drifted in dreamlike,
In-and-out, in-and-out motions,
Constantly appearing and disappearing, peering
At the thick, greenish algae-encrusted glass windows,
Straining with the water’s weight,
Like mysterious merman and mermaid mammoths
Misting into unseen, murky distance.

Eyeless, elephantine islets, floating
In a mat of massing, pulsing plant matter, glided past
Like nonchalant, denuded nunataks
Nosing out of the flat-white of glacial ice sheets.
Unvegetated humpy hillocks protruded
Through the vast vegetation in trackless plains
Like sleepy, slumbering sea-slugs
Performing lazy backstrokes between lush waterlilies.

Snoozing snugly, surrounded with entwining wreathes
Of weed, strands of sodden straw
Which floated in a succulent, sludgy soup,
Milling hither and thither in moist mush,
Giant, grey, ghostlike, glabrous shadows
In the imagination, but still realistic enough,
Sea-cows, hummocks of hunger,
In herds in the herb-swill, still slobbered, salivating.

But not as we see cows chewing,
But like huge, hovering hoovers sucking and pulling
At the plush, pulsating pile
Of an ever-changing, moving magic-carpet of rough hessian,
Which spiralled almost silently
Into the wide-open whirlpools of cavernous mouthholes,
Immense, magnetic mouseholes, which gaped black.
Graspingly, in the gooey, greyish gloom.

As if grazing the blue-green grass of flowering flax,
Browsing, blue-grey bullocks bunched
As they mused and munched, munched and mused,
In the well-mixed watery mulch,
Amorphous blobs of blubber buried
In a seething stew of severed stems, roots and leaves
Grumbling and lumbering blindly in myopic migration
In a vast, voluminous goldfish bowl.

And all serenely swimming in semi-silence,
A humming of breathstopping hush,
Perforated only with a perfunctory, dull thud
Of muffled, churning, turning motor
To agitate the gently rotating gyrations
Of gluey gunge, inviting occasional oxygen
Into the semi-opaque gurgling goulash,
Housing the humungous hulks of dozy dugongs.