Poetry

Flat on sun-beat boulders, body sagging

Melting heavily onto grey glistening rock

Iguana, you give sense to gravity

 

Horned face, with glum, inscrutable grin

Tiny bulging eyes wrapped in a bracelet of scales

Staring out, unmoving, anchoring my gaze

 

A line of spikes along your spine and tail

Some bent over, hot wilting armour

Legs, pudgy like a baby’s, end in long black claws

 

You are one, unique, then I look again

Dotted along the shore, lying in the sun, you are many

Legion, waiting to be washed and cooled by white frothing wave

 

You lay your head on one another – a clump, a tangle, of nine, ten, eleven

Social reptiles, sharing warmth scale to scale

I had not imagined you so

 

A monster twice your size, an adult iguana, beige and spitting

Rears up, head shaking in anger or simply mad

Black iguanas, I thought asleep, scurry off – cautious children

 

The giant scatters the small, head shaking and bobbing

Squirting liquid from its nostrils - not flames, just water

This dragon of the Galapagos

 

There is no nervous laughter, not like when

Grandad came to stay, still fighting the war, his

Make-believe battle that might just be real

 

Giant - you mad intruder, lunatic uncle let loose, or

Fed-up father gone around the bend

Offspring scattering in your path

 

You reptiles are social anti-social creatures

Like us

I had not imagined you so