A Drop in the Rainforest
Hi there,
Today I have a poem portraying some of my current surroundings in the Costa Rican rainforest, informed by some of what I’ve learned about this environment in my first week exploring the tropical world. Hopefully there’s more like it to come.
Enjoy.
Yellow flowers from the canopies
sprinkle slick green leaves across the understory,
crept up by vines, marched by termites.
In a true rainforest, not a drop reaches the floor
filtering through the density of life above.
After the monocrop blights and vacated vaca pastures,
the true forests are returning, so
the insects who survived the pesticides
must remember how to climb up.
The caterpillars every other creature would want to eat
develop neurotoxic spines for protection
until they age into their wings.
The radiant parents grown out of and laying these crawling children
flutter in wave formations across river valleys
run high with the wettest season ever recorded in writing.
The butterflies fall still and unfold their pattern displays
upon upright stalks of incomparable flowers, with comparative common names:
Christmas candle, torch ginger, lobster claw.
Amphibians await dusk as birds do dawn
like clockwork, to puff up their chests and release
an improvised mating song.
Beneath fallen palm frond blankets,
snakes salivate venom and scorpions rear stings,
hoping against the grand design, they won’t have to hurt anything
(or at least what they do, they can also eat).
A muddied, seasonally flooded gravel road runs through it all
ferrying gringos like you and I into the foliage obscurity
by exploding the fossilized remnants of forests from prehistory
(it just keeps growing).
