Don’t Ever Contemplate the Stench of Rotting Seaweed

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Though frost is almost never felt on shores

Like Cape Canaveral’s, sweating sun drags down

The sons and daughters, wives and men.  It scores

Against all dragging creatures.  Armpits frown

In shirts and blouses.  Sharp mosquitoes bite

And jellyfish go lolloping in waves

To find unwary skin.  The humid blight

Goes crawling over, making humans slaves

Scourged down with damp like Satan’s devils’ breath.

The fish below the brackish ripples of

Lagoons avoid the torture but then death

Finds pain in nets, on hooks rejecting love.

  The sting rays wait with stings on tails for feet

     And calves that they can sting, barbed worse than heat.

©  Phillip Whidden