Poem: ‘Baby Crocodile’

Science in meter and verse

By Naila Moreira & Stephen Petegorsky

Edited by Dava Sobel

Tender bones, tiny soul: it could escape
in death in an instant. Itself death-dealer—
mouth of teeth, tyrannosaur
in miniature, an apparently exact copy
of its dozen nestmates—it repeats, too, time.

Yet over its life lurks the great oversoul:
the mother. She hulks. Seems to sleep. Slitty eyes,
creaking limbs, so freighted
with scales and bulk as to appear unmovable,
she tolerates our whispering observation

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for minutes on end, gaggle of stupid tourists
closer to death than they think.
All at once she shifts. Someone has edged
too close, camera at the ready, leaning.
Her monstrous shape lunges,
wedge-head swinging, fixing

us with reptilian glare:
hard, cold, glittering, driving
as a Cadillac, and seeming as emotionless.
But that’s the thing with life, we’re all
the same. Repeated instances

of the same thing. This mother
is me, the surging swamp
within her the same that boils
from my gut, breast, and brain whenever
another small child strips a toy

from my son, or whacks him with a stick;
when a pickup truck cuts the corner
too close as I’m carting my child behind my bike.
Vigilant, monstrous, enormous
guardianship underlain by rage: oh this world

is too much a war, too harsh, is what
each mother, great freight of making, brooks
on the mud by black creek waters or
on the side of a shuddering mattress
when she wrests from the great nothingness a life.