Last Look

The ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica are melting
but the Neolithic Briton had a one-in-fourteen chance

of having his head bashed in. What do you do
with the mass grave of dodos discovered on Mauritius?

Or the family of retarded people walking on all fours
they found in Turkey? Either you get up or you don't

and the scientists insist we're still evolving. A recent
study of bats found that males with big brains have

small testicles. Holocaust survivors are more prone
to die from cancer. Guppies go through menopause. The rhesus

monkey drinks more when it drinks alone. Homesickness
is on the rise in Canada. A pair of inebriated moose

attacked a Swedish old folks' home. So what they did
in Guantanamo was shocking but not really

more than Taiwan's transgenic pigs that glow
in the dark — as, apparently, so do we — or the toxic

waste in the Arctic turning hungry polar bears
hermaphroditic. It's extreme, but the gene

experts conjecture we're only about ten percent
human, the rest of our cells bacteria. And the red

rains that fell mysteriously over India way back
in 2001, no one knows what they were.

Astronomers posit small clusters of galaxies
near Andromeda are floating on a river of dark

matter and postulate Pluto to be
colder than Charon, its moon. We're not alone:

dolphins use names and songbirds
grammar. The male Nigerian putty-nosed

monkey makes the sentence pyow hack hack pyow
hack hack to indicate it's time to be moving on.

Copyright © 2008 Todd Hearon All rights reserved
from Poetry London
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission