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A Poem to Celebrate National Bat Day: Bats in a Tourist Cave [1]

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Date: 2023-04-17  

Tadarida brasiliensis,

One of 17 species who use Carlsbad Caverns – speaks for them all...



Long have we dwelled in this dark hollow

Ours forever we might say, though,

Time is not something bats follow.



Then the tourists came

To steal our day

How could we sleep

With the voices, the lights, the stumbling of feet

Echoing away?



So we mocked war thundering our wings

Over your heads,

But our crisscrossing flights only seemed

To encourage you more –

The sudden frights, brought you delight

Instead of dread.



Bats are not crazy,

We have learned to accommodate

And sleep only in sectors you do not go,

Still we play our parts –

A selected hundred or so along with their mates

Flash through the airspace above your tallest

Bringing aloud the shrieks of your young

Sounding so much like the squeaks

Our own children have sung.



Lately our numbers have dwindled

Your trespassing presence being more intense

You have brought the white nose disease

For which we have little defense,

Worse yet, we grow hungrier, too,

Both leading to why

We are becoming so few

Now hundreds of thousands instead of the millions

Less every birth cycle,

Where is our food?



When the sun turns red, then violet

A glorious throng into the skies we kite

But where are the moths, crickets,

Mosquitos and gnats,

Vanished it seems

Are the insects of the night –

What have you done out there?

Carl Scott Harker ©2023

__________________________________________

My latest book of poetry is now available on Amazon, you can find more great poems in here: An Engineer of Words.

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