Beyond the Light: Didelphis marsupialis*
Your terrier’s wrathful racket
is aimed at a beast on the lawn
paused on its journey to dawn.
He longs to dash out and attack it.
Strange how the creature’s hind feet
sport thumbs like yours, while its tail
is as bare as a rat’s and as pale
as birch. You’ve a ringside seat
to regard this ghost from Antares —
and yet it is so much like you!
Is it merely moseying through
your garden to feast on the berries?
It creeps as it crept long ago
when this township was forest and glen,
where outlines of foraging men
slunk through Luna’s glow.
Its rosy snout, sharp in shape
and smell, is not nearly as keen
as the terrier’s. Pressed to the screen,
he watches the varmint escape
back to a realm all around you —
the realm of the owl and the bat,
the fox and the feral cat.
They enter your dreams and they hound you.
But as shadows grow shy and retreat,
you forget those weird thumbs, the gray hair,
that white face and oracular stare,
till you spot one (dead?) in the street.
*Opossum
Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Martin’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. His honors include First Place in the Traditional Sonnet category of the 2022 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, Rhymezone’s poetry contest (2016) co-winner, the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition (2014) winner, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s poetry contest (2015) third place, four Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination. A full-length collection, Celestial Euphony, was published by Plum White Press in 2019.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 