📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00354 ◊ Mimic Men ◊ Stacia Cyrene Yearwood
Mimic Men
Heliconius butterflies, classical models of Müllerian mimicry, display a continuum of geographic divergence by altering the photonic scattering of light from the landscape of their scabrous wings. German naturalist, Fritz Müller describes this mimicry as a phenomenon where two or more species that may or may not be closely related, but share a common predator, mimic the other’s warning signals. Often, the usually clear identity of mimic and model are blurred. For instance, to assault the marauding darkness of despair, the immigrant speaks of homeland where the lights of the city yield to a pastoral rhythm, where the mangrove’s prayer is visible as evening falls, or where hyaline noon comes wrapped in noiseless rain. Soon, this life is dominated by the other life they must all begin: the riotous flickering of fluorescents, night shifts paralyzing daylight hours, the constant menacing of sirens. To survive, they pack their old selves into battered suitcases, don characterless uniforms, fit their faces into blank stares – the mask becoming the man, but slowly.
—Stacia Cyrene Yearwood
—found in Beltway Poetry Quarterly (Vol. 14, No. 4.; Fall 2013)