Poems by Michael Burch
The King of Beasts in the Museum of the Extinct
The king of beasts, my child,
was terrible, and wild.
His roaring shook the earth
till the feeble cursed his birth.
And all things feared his might:
even rhinos fled, in fright.
Now here these bones attest
to what the brute did best
and the pain he caused his prey
when he hunted in his day.
For he slew them just for sport
till his own pride was cut short
with a mushrooming cloud and wild thunder;
Exhibit "B" will reveal his blunder.
After the Poetry Recital
Later there’ll be talk of saving whales
over racks of lamb and flambéed snails.
Evangelical Fever
Welcome to global warming:
temperature 109.
You don’t believe in science,
but isn’t the weather Divine?
God to Man, Contra Bataan
Earth, what-d’ya think of global warming?
Perth is endangered, the high seas storming.
Now all my creatures, from worm to man
Know how it felt on the march to Bataan.
Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.
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