Words Count with Mama Zen, for Day 9

The title of this post might have rhymed nicely if it had waited until tomorrow, but time, tide and poem-a-day challenges wait for no one. So we won't have:

Now day ten

with Mama Zen

who tells us when

to stop.

60 words

she says today

60 words

is tops.

Too bad, I might have enjoyed that. But Day 9 it is.

Instead of waiting until tomorrow for our rhyming pleasure, Mama Zen got all googly and found the amazing color drawings of Maria Sibylla Merian, an artist and naturalist who, probably to the shock and horror of her contemporaries, traveled from Amsterdam to Suriname, South America in 1699, unchaperoned except by her young daughter.
MZ offers us four illustrations from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, from which to choose for our poems of yes, 60 words or less.

Anyone familiar with the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads will realize Mama Zen is the queen bee of brevity. That lady can pack more real meaning into 50 or 60 words than I can into pages of rambling, meandering, frivolous nonsense. Hard to believe, I know, but very true.

hello, said the caterpillar

to the moth

I’ll look like you one day

I eat these leaves

and then cocoon

for weeks

of beauty treatment.

you might not see

when I emerge

or you might —

if you aren’t

eaten by a bird

 43 words by Kay Davies, April 9, 2013

wow, said the butterfly to the bee

how differently aerodynamic are we:

my wings are large,

my body small

while you look like you

should not fly at all.

29 words by Kay Davies, April 9, 2013