More Verses from the Antipodes

Bella Lugosi was never bellicose, frightening

Though he might have been, with his his ugly face,

His shivery voice, I could feel a tightening

In my muscles. Cinema was a scary place

For a child who barely could distinguish dream

From awkward word, and never heard of actors:

What we saw was real, who evoked a scream

Was someone or something near.  Other factors

Never entered my mind: projector, film, a beam

Of light through the darkness to a screen; directors,

Producers, stuntmen, never heard of.  A gleam,

A ghost, a glimmering of fantasy.

Dracula, Frankenstein and frightened me.

                     ***

This is what they found

in a small sarcophagus,

barely formed, impure,

a mummified foetus:

who is it that bound

the unborn creature

with such love and care,

more valuable to life  than air?

Here is something else discovered

near the sea, impressed in shale,

a female dinosaur who covered

her child as the earth grew pale

and eternal night, mysterious,

in the wake of a meteor’s fall:

she gazes down at it, not us,

as mothers always must.

Their death, they say, opened a place

for our ancestors.  I trust

somewhere they realize this grace,

this unintended natural sacrifice,

our gratefulness through time’s dark must,

not dregs, not even ambergris,

but born of cosmic longing, the face

of an unending primal lust.