Tuesday, 17 June 2025

A Poem a Day (719): Sea claws

 
A prompt from napowrimo.net: “I challenge you to find a news article and write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article. You can repeat them, splice them and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be just the facts, your poem doesn’t have to be.”
 
Here’s draft 2 of my poem and the spliced version follows underneath.


 
Sea claws
 
Choose an article & splice it,
redo, refit, the prompt said,
so I hunted for a happy one, devoid
of war & fighting, death, hate
& suffering. It took a while.
 
So here we are with lobsters,
those snippy little fellows with claws,
a crusher & a cutter, aqua-true
with beady black eyes.
 
Homarus Gammarus, to be posh,
or European lobster to me & you,
paddling the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
In calm waters around St Michael’s Mount,
baby lobsters indulged in their first swim,
all 1,088 of them, ten weeks old
& just an inch long.
 
You’ll need to check a map
as to its whereabouts,
but it’s pretty famous,
so you can probably picture it.
 
It was the end of a challenge
to do 25 releases in 25 locations,
a happy 25th anniversary
to the National Lobster Hatchery.
5,000 little snappers in all.
 
A female lobster can carry 20,000 eggs
in her belly, but only one is expected to survive
out there in the wild.
 
Released from a little plastic tube
they dive down, limbs flaying, scuttling,
to settle on the seabed & burrow
deep into spongy sediment
to spend a year learning how to live
in the bounteous sea.
 
You can even adopt one.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025


 
 
Sea claws (the spliced version)
 
Happy devoid,
no war, no suffering,
a shakeup into cuteness.
It took a while.
 
With crusher & cutter,
snippy & aqua-true,
Homarus Gammarus paddles
the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
Ten weeks old
& just an inch,
baby lobsters begin
their maiden voyage.
1,088 tiny clappers floating free.
 
A dive down, scuttle
& burrow deep into the sea floor.
They’ll spend a year here,
learning how to live.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025


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