Iella
Images manipulated by Pika-so
A poem is a wondrous thing, because no matter what the author might have intended, the reader will "read" whatever they will see ... Though the poem was meant to be about a carnivorous plant's extinction, others have read the near-extinction of the whole Jedi order in its lines. Read onward, drill deeply, like the Belkadan sundew itself ...
Doom ... a symphony of
discord earbashing the land,
drowning its protestations
under thunderous swells,
percussion clash of storms
unheralded, unparalleled
... undeserved.
Like tremulous quavers in the tumult,
like a whisper of woodwind above
the orchestra of apocalypse — a still,
small voice pipes its haunting lament
for the hopeless ... falters, fades.
We are dying ... heed our cry.
Vegetable by nature,
the Belkadan sundew
commands no armies,
basks not in seats of power
but in the mothering
warmth of swamps.
Its feats go unrecorded,
its presence understated:
entry four thousand and sixty
in the Botanica Galactica
Toiling not nor spinning
it is neither newsworthy
nor heroic, and yet it too
can claim a victory of sorts
... survival.
Through the soup haze of primeval mists,
through mauve stipple and rose stripe
of countless dawns, the tiny plant clung
obstinately to its link in the great chain
that cycles oiled and smoothed by the habits
of millennia — birth, fruition, death, rebirth.
Tuned to this ancient refrain, it prospered,
quietly suckling through root umbilicals,
its halo of crimson villi unintentional witness
to the fiery cataclysms that mark the death
of stars, to comet trails scarring the ether dome.
Extinction, therefore, was unexpected.
The march of seasons gave no
hint of impending doom, no
tell-tale mutations, no
signals of demise.
One day
there were beetles,
a crawling carapace of beetles
razing the land, turning verdant green
to rotting compost the colour of dried blood.
And we will hear
no trumpet call
to mourn its passing,
only a still, small voice
on gossamer solar winds
crying into the infinite void:
Save us we are ...
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