A 3M-long scrub python is preyed on by a plane.
In my effort to write two new poems a week based on things I’ve seen in the news, here’s today’s attempt (a little more minimalist that yesterday’s asteroid effort, but rather more crafted!). It’s fairly self-explanatory – but based on the news story from the pic above and the excerpt below. Rather sad, I thought – despite it garnering plenty of attention for its ‘Snakes on a Plane’ connotations. So as is my way, I wanted to write something to present the other perspective…
“A 10ft (3m) scrub python was battling to retain its grip on the wing as a plane made its way between the Australian town of Cairns and Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.”
– BBC News, 11th January 2013
Prey, or White Metal Cave
Hunger lured the hermit in
beneath the aluminium fuselage skin:
a white metal cave – a pristine space
for preying (on cloud rodents which were not there).
A head peeps out, tasting its lair,
expecting.
Until the monster-bird takes to the clouds and so:
earthquake-shatter hurricane-roar at two-hundred-and-fifty degrees
below. It doesn’t look down at the scrub, shrinking trees, gaping coast. A rope
cut adrift, a tube loosed from its machine, it clings;
stains kangaroo fuselage,
sprays the wing.
The last image it might have caught?
Touching shoulder to shoulder, head to heart,
a human, chewing, with a camera-shaped face.
Click. Looks the other way. Python
becomes prey.