From All-Creatures.org

Animal Rights Poetry By Lee Slonimsky

Dragonflies in Love

They piggyback in parabolas
of lust, looping through noonbright air,
writing their gene-scripted history
over and over as elegantly
as the hushed wing fluttering
with which an eagle, no more than ten
or twelve yards away, brakes,
before talon-spearing a rainbow trout
that caught fatal sunlight.

Unabashed, as if boasting of
needle quick, nuanced motion,
they knife the air, slice blue light
into shreds of silver
drifting across Oak Pond.
The splash of a frog, slither of a snake
do little to distract from
the aura of dragonflies in love.

A hint of breeze wrinkles the sheen
of silver water, as if suggesting
the great age for which this ritual
aerial merge has gone on.
Bodies of blue, green, black, orange,
wings as gossamer blurry as light,
they dart in diaphanous swerves of longing,
the pulse by which heat shimmers and dances
pounding through their thin bright veins.

 

© Lee Slonimsky, 2023

 

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