Cryptozoology

To one who has found a yeti hair in the snow
Or a centaur’s hoofprints in the woods,
The mission is clear.
I should be hunting werewolves in the mountains of Bulgaria
Or sailing after mermaids off the Azores.
I should hoist anchor now and head for the Norwegian Deep
To do battle with the kraken.
(Beware, sailors, when you venture ashore
On that inviting isle, to light your fires,
Lest you are on the snoozing monster’s back).
My place is with the simurgh and caladrius,
The manticore, the orc.

A thousand years as an egg
Then the Chinese dragon hatches at last
And spends another five hundred years as a water snake,
Gradually developing the head of a carp;
Over the next thousand years the creature
Acquires scales, four limbs with claws
And an elongated bearded face;
It takes another five centuries to grow horns;
And,not until a whole millennium has passed,
Does it finally sprout wings
And become a mature ying-lung.
Seldom seen, they patrol the skies, hiding in clouds,
Avidly following rain and storms,
And hibernate in deep pools, rivers and the sea.
To the Emperor Fuxi
The symbols of the I Ching were revealed
By a yellow dragon,
The trigrams spelled out by patterns in its hair.

Take care when entering woodlands,
The habitat of the wyvern,
With his aquiline talons and barbed stinging tail:
Aggressive by nature, he will attack on sight
Anything that might provide a meal.
According to the bestiary,he is Satan’s agent,
Heralding war,prestilence and sin.
To the alchemists,he symbolizes base matter,
Which the worthy knight of the laboratory
Overcomes and transmutes into gold.

I read sworn reports of mermaid sightings
And imagine their voices singing above the storm,
Calling to the mariner,to drown him.
(In 1403, a mermaid was swept through a broken dike
In the Dutch town of Haarlem;
There, she lived in captivity for fifteen years,
Taught to spin wool and kneel in front of a crucifix,
But was never heard to speak
And attempted many times to escape back to the sea)

A few breeding pairs of rocs still dwell, it is said,
On the isle of Madagascar,
In the lofty Massif of Tsaratanana;
Marco Polo reports that Kublai Khan
Was presented with a roc’s feather twelve paces long.
The female lays a single vast egg on the beach,
To be incubated by the sun and hot sand;
Only when the baby roc has hatched
Does the mother transport it to its nest in the clouds.
Thenceforth the roc spends its lifetime soaring
On the highest thermals of the sky,
And only ever alights at Mount Gaf, axis of the world.

The ki-lin is very seldom glimpsed,
That rainbow-coloured body and long horn,
Extremely powerful and swift, impossible to catch or kill,
Yet so gentle it will not harm any living thing;
It will not even tread on an insect and consumes only dead grass.
Few indeed are those in China
Who have heard its melodious enchanting voice.
Once,an expedition from the court of Genghis Khan
Encountered a ki-lin in the western deserts,
And were given a message of loving peace to pass onto the Khan,
Who, when he heard it, cancelled a military campaign.