Poetry

There's a certain power that can be felt when one hears of predator and prey. The gravity reels me in; I feel compelled to see the relationship in action. There's an old African proverb:

Each day a gazelle wakes up and knows it has to run faster than the fastest lion.
Each day a lion wakes up and knows it has to run faster than the slowest gazelle.
Lion or gazelle, one thing is for sure, when the sun rises, you better start running.

So many of today's situations revolve around this relationship; even poems attempt to capture this power. However words can only do so much...
Tiger Hunting

Lion Training

Lion Attacks Woman - Watch more Funny Videos

The tiger is one of my four totem animals, and after seeing these videos one thing is sure, I am dangerous! "A tiger is a predator, its mission on the earth is to kill, and indoing so it often displays awesome strength and dexterity" (Anthology, 153). This line from Harrigan's Tiger Is God captures nature with pure simplicity and brutal accuracy. After reading that line, I took a breather and thought, "Hmmm... Harrigan is divine!" Miguel is a power figure and in Hinduism, the Lion and the Tiger are a symbol of Goddess Durga, who was born out of a divine collection, but once I started reading Miguel and Tovar's story, I was distracted from everything else, even my core religious beliefs; I just couldn't stop till I had read every single word.

Australia! Let's Go Outback Tonight!


However, when I was reading Blake, I stopped reading quite often. For some reason, I felt like a Canadian in South Park as I read through Blake's poems and couldn't stop myself from reading the poem in sort of song/rhyme/chant. I was utterly LOST (slight reference to the TV show) and clueless, but I felt a connection between Blake's Spring and the Predator-Prey relationship, particularly its last stanza (Anthology, 141-142):

Little Lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool;
Let me kiss Your soft face;
Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year.

'Spring' - Blake


After reading Spring, I felt as if Blake was writing every poem from a Lion's perspective. Take Spring. In the very first line, I hear a Lion's mighty roar! Lion's love easy prey, and the second stanza is about the "merry... noise" little boys and girls make; surely, they're a distress signal for the lion which the lion takes to be, "Come and eat me! I am alone, not too much work!" After all, the lion is the King of the Jungle; shouldn't it get meals on a silver platter? After that stanza, there's the third stanza which is reproduced above. The lion is looking for a lamb to eat, and at that thought, it thinks about what a wonderful start to 2010 would it be to have a lamb for dinner, so he says, "Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year" (Anthology, 142).

The Ghost and the Darkness

(On a side-note Prof. Bump, we should totally watch this movie in class, The Ghost and the Darkness, it's about two Lions in Africa which hunted and killed over 200 humans [I think that's the number] during a railroad construction; these lions grew a taste for humans and were come to be known as the Devil's Pets!)