Poem
Chris Mann
The Dragonfly
The Dragonfly
The Dragonfly
Your lineage is as old as coal,your life, in the swirl of stars,
a twitch of plasma on a reed.
Rafting down the Zambezi
I saw your filigree shimmer
on a boulder’s bulky sphinx.
The raft had spun in an eddy,
bumped up against a gorge
and grounded on a cornice.
I was glad to rest. Upstream
a vortex in the slide of green
had flung the raft on its back
and for an eternity of panic
had swirled me down, down,
churning me in its Charybdis,
until I felt certain I would die.
How greedily then I registered
the powdery, glistening bands
of crimson around your back,
each wingtip’s lunette of blue.
I dipped a finger in the river
and wrote my name in water
on the hot, eroded granite.
Before I’d streaked the last letter
the writing and you had gone.
© 2004, Chris Mann
From: Scrutiny 2, Vol.9
Publisher: UNISA, Pretoria
From: Scrutiny 2, Vol.9
Publisher: UNISA, Pretoria
Poems
Poems of Chris Mann
Close
The Dragonfly
Your lineage is as old as coal,your life, in the swirl of stars,
a twitch of plasma on a reed.
Rafting down the Zambezi
I saw your filigree shimmer
on a boulder’s bulky sphinx.
The raft had spun in an eddy,
bumped up against a gorge
and grounded on a cornice.
I was glad to rest. Upstream
a vortex in the slide of green
had flung the raft on its back
and for an eternity of panic
had swirled me down, down,
churning me in its Charybdis,
until I felt certain I would die.
How greedily then I registered
the powdery, glistening bands
of crimson around your back,
each wingtip’s lunette of blue.
I dipped a finger in the river
and wrote my name in water
on the hot, eroded granite.
Before I’d streaked the last letter
the writing and you had gone.
From: Scrutiny 2, Vol.9
The Dragonfly
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