News Item: Chimpanzee Escapes from Zoo in Antwerp

Ernest Sandeen

In Antwerp where as everywhere they blink
Skyward through imaginations dark with the speed
Of engineered angels, the people shrink
Before the apparition of chimpanzee
Strutting frankly along the street. In a glee
Of danger they breathe-in the hot hairy stink
Of equatorial terror like freshened air.

Of course they run, for being just as far
Advanced in fright as all of us now are
Only an unsophisticated scare
Like this can hurt them or draw blood from the abstract scar
Winding like a fuse around their marrow.
The chimpanzee, however, at large to stare
For once at worlds that stared at him runs amok.

A caricature of prophetic weathercock,
You might say, he swings his body in sacred rage
Up to the jungle of housetops and begins to tear
Historic tiles and stones apart, age by age.
Therefore to end the story he must be shot
And the whole fairy tale becomes the kind of joke
You wonder if you should tell the children or not.