Misplaced
African gazelles live and thrive in the desert
scrub surrounding El Paso, and New Mexico’s
White Sands Missile Range.
A graceful and gorgeous animal, the oryx
was endangered in its ancestral homeland,
but is now a pest here in its new desert home
a softer place with no natural predators than
its native Kalahari, breeding far beyond
their boundaries within lands that regularly
test military missiles.
They must be hunted, the five thousand or more
that live out there, to reduce them to the acceptable
five hundred they were expected to be when released.
A well meaning program by uninformed people
to boost their numbers creates chaos in a land
not naturally their home.
… and there we have the dangers of meddling with the balance of nature in one small example, very well and clearly described.
I think this would be enriched by expanding on what one of the animals looks and acts like, how you feel about them as individuals and not just as a group. The reader would be more involved also, and needs to be.
Do the animals get injured and killed in the weapons testing?
What’s happening in AFrica? Can any be sent back? You arouse the curiosity in me of the part of me that enjoys listening to NPR.
Well penned, I enjoyed the poem