(Anostraca)
Who, if his son asks for bread, would give him
a stone? Maybe the father of the fairy shrimp:
three hundred species, from Antarctica
to desert to frozen mountain lakes.
Some have no fathers—parthenogenesis.
All can go dormant: in diapause, as cysts,
they can withstand drought, frost, salt,
radiation, even the vacuum of space,
for centuries—then, carried by currents
or predators or winds, stirred back to life
by the ephemeral waters of spring pools
all over the Midwest, they cruise, supping
on algae soup, feeding mallards and fish.
Who needs any more miracle than this?
—
Barbara Ungar’s sixth book, After Naming the Animals, is new from The Word Works, which also published Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life. Prior books include Save Our Ship, which won the Snyder Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Poetry Prize. A professor emerita, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. www.barbaraungar.net
