Dance of the Megafauna

[amaril]

Revision 1

Dance of the Megafauna


Trumpets blaze in the Mesozoic ooze.
The gilled beaks of plesiosaurs
click shut on each off beat.
Each beast has a horn, a bone to share.
Theropods waltz with their claws in the air.
Ecstatic pterodactyls encircle the ring,
ready to eat the ones who break time.
Stegosaurus levels her spines.

The duck-billed dinosaurs know how to shake
their fishy tails in a most seductive way.
Nine-foot spiders wink their syncopated eyes.
Who wrote the lyrics? The Brachiosaur.
His roar is hypnotic. Mile high pines
lean to the left, lean to the right.
An anachronistic mastodon's
got his tusk stuck in the slime.

Cephalopods! Stromatolites!
Do not lament your exclusion.
You had epochs to prove your worth to the sun.
Your dust collects in volcanic troughs
for posterity, and these vertebrates
drunk on sulfur must also face
the due wrath of a duplicate moon.
Only the horseshoe crab knows how to hide.

Listen to Ankylosaur, his rhythmic sense
sublime. Observe the warm-blooded
synapsids waving furled ferns
like fans for fun. How sweet
Compsognathus sings, dodging
the terrible teeth of tyranosaurs!
Australopithecus? Homo Habili?
Who watches enviously from the sidelines?

You'll soon have your turn, whichever
hominid you are. This Cretaceous
celebration cannot last for long.
Why bother living when to live is yet to die?
Why not revel in our bodies while we can?
Good luck finding answers
whether you dance or swim or fly.
Goodnight, my friends. Goodbye.



Original Version

Trumpets blaze in the Mesozoic ooze.
The gilled beaks of plesiosaurs
click shut on each off beat.
Each beast has a horn, a bone to share.
Theropods waltz with their claws in the air.
Ecstatic pterodactyls encircle the ring,
ready to eat the ones who break time.
Stegosaurus levels her spines.

The duck-billed dinosaurs know how to shake
their fishy tails in a most seductive way.
Nine-foot spiders wink their syncopated eyes.
Who wrote the lyrics? The Brachiosaur.
His roar is hypnotic. Mile high pines
lean to the left, lean to the right.
An anachronistic mastodon's
got his tusk stuck in the slime.

Yes—the world is ending.
We've known this all along.
So why not celebrate our bodies while we can?
One good whiff of sulfur puts a lizard in a trance.
All the clouds unravel. Music can be cruel.
Deep in the sky is a duplicate moon.
Like an intake of breath
the atmosphere explodes.

Unbearable quiet descends on the scene.
The dancers don their feather hats.
A long black wave rolls out of the sea.
Goodnight, my friends. Goodbye.

[CRNDLSM]

Disney's fantasia made me obsessed with Stravinsky. Is the mastodon the only anachronism here? The music is surely. And what is the duplicate moon? Glad this is for fun, id like to see more

[RiverNotch]

nay! i believe the duck billed dinosaurs lived inthe cretaceous, while stegosaurs in the jurassic -- that's millions of years of difference! the whole thing is filled with anachronisms!

jest aside, stegosaurus levels her spines reads way too unwiedy to work -- too many s's. bound to be a better substitute for this.

the each's of the first stanza also jump from each other in a way that's kinda unpleasant.

--fine, another jest: in no way are hadrosaur tails fishy, unless you'd consider the tail of a reptile the same as that of a fish. okay, back to aesthetic points, as i can see how that works lesss literally--

request for clarification: what exactly are you trying to convey with nine-foot spiders? i do 't remember anythig like that belonging to the mesozoic....

em dash between yes and the statement feels like an unusual and ultimately unnecessary convention rather than a ripe trick of language -- better to just comma. third stanza also suffers from being divided into sentences that don't need to be sentences on their own; itreally only worked in the first stanza, and then only barely; otherwise it's just awkward, the developed mental rhythm. of the stanza, the first two lines should be separated only by, say, an em dash, and the last two sentences sound better conjoined, say with an and.

and the final stanza kinda sucks -- it ain't as vivid as all that came before, and really its imagery of death is quite redundant. particularly with a calamity as popular as this, and with imagery and thoughts as vibrant as the earlier three stanzas, i think it would be best to just trust the reader, remove those final four lines.

but yes, the first three stanzas are quite vibrant, and having had paleontology as a childhood obsession, i'm glad to have read this. lovely, lovely work!

[amaril]

So after about a million years, I finally bothered to revise the this poem's lackluster ending. I felt (and still feel) that the first two stanzas were polished in the original, so I left them as-is. RiverNotch--the excessive consonance is intended, so I added some sweet 'f' sounds to compliment the 's's. I also like the restrained sentences here, in part because I am prone to run-ons. However, it is def possible that the sentence structure/length could be more varied.

I am vaguely concerned that the tone of the original poem was compromised by the addition of stanzas, but that might be a good thing anyway.

edit. I've made a number of small edits to R1 since posting it.