Singapore Night Zoo
Black bushes, blacker grass,
a night without stars or moon,
the animals are silent,
still as illustrations
in a children’s picture-book –
a mottled giraffe, leggy hyenas,
dusky lions, tiny mouse-deer
hidden by leaves,
a fishcat dipping its paw
into a pool,
a rhinoceros with tusks,
elephants too large for their page.
Don’t photograph or feed them.
Talk only in whispers.
Like childhood fears,
these shadow-shapes loom,
separated from us by ditches
and flimsy fences.
Sarah Barr
©
Sarah Barr
2011
Published in 2013 in ‘Poems from the Oak Room’
ISBN 978-0-9562778-4-8
Sarah Barr 