What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 06 08 20 | Ronnie Sirmans

Ronnie Sirmans
Dragons Were Already Here

Poor little baby alligators far from water.
That’s how they tricked us. The babies
were not our gators. They were invasive,
a South American lizard that grows
so large I don’t know why they don’t
call it a dragon. I believe in dragons.
Despite our control efforts, these tegus
have been spotted again where gators
have never feared to tread. But I know:

Dragons were already here even before
the wildlife rangers were keeping track.
Even when I was still in school, I heard
about tegus wearing their pointy white
hoods while drinking beer in the woods.
Back then, tegus with white collars, some
in healthy white coats, turned blind eyes
as desirable men with feared blood died
of an incurable new virus acronymized.

How the years fly by; we come to believe
that we are growing wiser, safer, stronger,
while scales, claws creep into the swamp
and even into our backyards. Were tegus
wearing badges when violence escalated?
Weren’t some tegus wearing flag lapel pins
when they told some of us to shut up? Threats
also can be invisible, so we distance ourselves.
That dry cough? The sound before tegus bite.

—Submitted on 06/08/2020

Ronnie Sirmans‘ poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Sojourners, Jewish Currents, America, and other journals. An award-winning headline writer, Sirmans lives in metro Atlanta.

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