Moray McGowan

Dragonfly

No jewelsmith carved your brilliance from lost Eden’s sky;
Your no lesser miracle begins
In the humid shade of horsetail ferns, towering tall
As trees. Since your first forbears struggled from larval skins,
Though your brain could nestle in a needle’s eye,
You have watched a billion species strut and fall
And when humanity’s strident course is surely, shortly, run,
Its crown tumbled into endless fire or endless winter,
Your winged shimmer will still splinter 
The blue of heaven from the slanting sun.

Moray McGowan, born into a Scottish-Irish family in London, grew up in Norwich (UK), studied in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Hamburg, wrapped chocolate, harvested fruit, dug trenches, delivered letters and baked boiler insulation before teaching English and German for forty years at universities in Germany, England, Scotland and Ireland. He now lives in Somerset (UK) and Berlin.