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A Poem to Celebrate National Bat Day: Bats in a Tourist Cave [1]
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Date: 2023-04-17
Tadarida brasiliensis,
One of 17 species who use Carlsbad Caverns – speaks for them all...
Long have we dwelled in this dark hollow
Ours forever we might say, though,
Time is not something bats follow.
Then the tourists came
To steal our day
How could we sleep
With the voices, the lights, the stumbling of feet
Echoing away?
So we mocked war thundering our wings
Over your heads,
But our crisscrossing flights only seemed
To encourage you more –
The sudden frights, brought you delight
Instead of dread.
Bats are not crazy,
We have learned to accommodate
And sleep only in sectors you do not go,
Still we play our parts –
A selected hundred or so along with their mates
Flash through the airspace above your tallest
Bringing aloud the shrieks of your young
Sounding so much like the squeaks
Our own children have sung.
Lately our numbers have dwindled
Your trespassing presence being more intense
You have brought the white nose disease
For which we have little defense,
Worse yet, we grow hungrier, too,
Both leading to why
We are becoming so few
Now hundreds of thousands instead of the millions
Less every birth cycle,
Where is our food?
When the sun turns red, then violet
A glorious throng into the skies we kite
But where are the moths, crickets,
Mosquitos and gnats,
Vanished it seems
Are the insects of the night –
What have you done out there?
Carl Scott Harker ©2023
__________________________________________
My latest book of poetry is now available on Amazon, you can find more great poems in here: An Engineer of Words.
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