June Month of Poetry Combined Days 7-9: Mysterious creatures
One of the parts I liked the best was the display set up to promote a Ren Fair being planned for next autumn (May) in Victoria, featuring a large green dragon as well as suitably faux-medieval dressed attendants. It got me thinking about the mysterious beasts of history, not so much cryptids (although there may be another post to come on the Yeti, still thinking about it) but more the array of dinosaur-like flying or swimming mythic creatures that almost certainly didn't exist, but maybe (maybe?) reference distorted folk memories or attempts to rationalise something else.
Historians disagree about what gave rise to dragon stories (which are found all over the world). Some have argued that that humans (like our distant cousins, the monkeys) have inherited instinctive reactions to snakes, large cats, and birds of prey, and that this is especially strong to snakelike creatures (which most early dragons are), leading to the fermentation of the myth of a super-snake predator. Others argue that some stories of dragons may have been inspired by ancient discoveries of fossils belonging to dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Others believe them to be entirely fictive, without psychosocial or material root. I personally doubt the last - most stories that gain that much potency mean *something*, even if the meaning is unrelated to the physical "truthiness" of the stories.
Taking this approach, my poem riffs off dragons, the Loch Ness Monster, and sea serpents / sea monsters. Let's consider it a three-day poem; I've done it as a sestina, which is a long and difficult form, so I think that's fair :-) The sestina form has seven stanzas (six with six lines and the final with three) with a very strict repeating rhyme pattern, represented as follows where each letter stands for the final word of the line.
1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE
Beasts
Once upon a time, or many times upon many times: a picture
rising from the mountain or diving from a smoke-choked sky
or slicking like silk, fluorescing in the dark, through deepest water,
scaled like a snake or like a fish, but this is no snake, no fish; burning,
incandescent as a dying sun, gold and crimson, green with sea-slime, or fading bronze,
the fire when it comes is for obliteration, in the air and on the sea.
What is this animal that rises like a prophecy from the buried sea?
what is this beast with the knowing in its eyes, painted into picture
on vellum and clay and stone and cloth, etched into bronze?
What is it we have always feared would come down from the sky
to lay all we are and all we have to waste, to set the fields to burning?
we have always looked for monsters in the water
daring to leave the land we chose once, so long ago, to cross open water
our ships so fragile, so small, on this the wide and deadly sea.
Always seeking for some meaning in the burning,
finding old dry bones in river beds, and recognising the picture
terrible beauty and beautiful horror glowing in the sky
the dusk turned dark, the good green earth to bronze.
Threading through all the stories like rivulets of bronze
speaking with serpent voice, as insidious as water.
Portents and spirits and great stinking beasts in the sky,
the judgement of the gods from the deep in the deepest sea.
The mirror reflects the things we fear; the story is a picture,
an embodiment of the primal flinch at burning.
It cannot be just fate or we ourselves that sets the world to burning;
better to dream a sly and fearsome creature, gold-flecked and bronze
from remnant traces and our plastic minds, to build a picture:
to tell again the stories of snake-demons in the water
to know and justify the terror of the sea:
to write in gold the danger from the sky.
Jewel eyes and fangs and poison in the sky
the sign that says: all you love is for the burning
you will be dragged to drown deep in the sea
the monster remnants light the world in bronze
the fear transmitted, tales drunk down like water
half-glimpsed patterns twisted into picture.
And standing, turning, born in the sun, a picture:
the ghosts of giant beasts in the sky and water
the fading day turns gold-melt into bronze.
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