Death-roll: An Elegy For Donna

Author’s notes: In the summer of 2008, a 12-foot American crocodile swam up a yacht-filled canal through the upscale town of Coral Gables, Florida before taking up residence at the University of Miami.

Although male, it was named "Donna" by students after university president Donna Shalala.

On October 1, Donna was found dead on the shore of Lake Osceola. Amidst public outcry, a man and boy were arrested a month later and charged with killing an endangered species.


Death-roll: An Elegy For Donna
Copyright © 2009 By Curtis Meyer

Maybe they forgot your ancestors ate dinosaurs:
Deinosuchus – 50 feet long, with a skull dwarfing that of T-Rex.

The Egyptians prayed to Sobek to grant them safe passage;
Believed crocodiles first to rise from waters of chaos
to create the world; Mummified them as patrons of the royal army,
their ferocity metaphor for strength and power. Your kind were respected –
worshipped even: Jaws like entrance to the underworld, symbol
for the fertility and abundance the Nile brought their crops and culture.

The male equivalent of Donna is "Donald."
It means "Great chief" or "World mighty."

In the realm of totems, alligators and crocodiles
mark the arrival of opportunity, water representing dreams
and the spirit world. I’d like to think that your presence brought good tidings
to the college kids awaiting their dreams to come into reality.

Instead, they baited you – we know this because
a bag of chum was found nearby. Your corpse: Relieved of its head and tail.
Your skull: Taken as a trophy. And I wonder who’s more cold-blooded.
The tribes of old used every part of the buffalo in ceremony. Your tail
was cooked, though it was said to be too musky to be enjoyed.

The worst thing you did alive was cause some picnic tables
to be rearranged at a local pub. You’d bask on the grass,
snacking on turtles like potato chips.

And it’s stories like this that make me hate my home-state. Florida:
Where snowbirds go to die. Florida means "Land of Flowers."
I guess that’s what a child might call a cemetery.

I picture you lonely, like a veteran in a nursing home
who’s lost all his friends; Once-mighty king of the Everglades
wracking his peanut brain for a quiet place to die.

Tonight I performed poetry at a talent show, took last place
under a singer and drag queen, had a judge tell me I was with the wrong crowd.

A month before they decapitated you, my best friend, another poet, hung himself.

I know what it’s like to be as obsolete as a blacksmith or sin-eater,
a relic of a bygone era. Donna – Don – I know how it feels to face
extinction, the last of a dying breed, no place left on the food chain.

Maybe nature shows focus too much on the basics:
– Gators have round snouts showing a top row of teeth.
– Crocs’ snouts are narrow with a zigzag pattern.

They don’t mention how when you’re in the water
the best defense is to dive under, because your adversary
risks drowning if they eat while submerged, or that crocs and gators
dance when they latch onto prey, a brilliant cyclone of fury called
a death-roll meant to snap necks and pull bones from sockets.

Magnificent water dragon, there is another Florida
beyond the postcard gloss of theme parks and orange blossoms,
where the sound of motors gives way to natives rowing in their longboats,
where Osceola is a great chief, proud and world mighty, not just the name
of a lake and county. Or if you prefer, there is another time primordial,
where flocks of herons are replaced by the squawks of pterodactyls.

It is there I see you: Not as some cumbersome collection of scales, teeth,
and all things sharp, but the majestic S of your tail moving with serpentine grace,
a giant's eyes peaking above the murk beneath a canopy of pine and Spanish moss,
the ballet of your death-roll as you pull down meals from the shore. A god amongst
reptiles, not feared, but respected, surveying a vision not of swampland, but paradise.