I am shopping on the Kalverstraat downtown,
the only man inside the H & M.
I find the gift I want to buy then notice
that the bevy all around me is not tame.

The mothers and daughters of predators, in times
future, past or present: these bright girls
with shining hair and you-come-hither eyes
are grazing high street shops in search of prey.

I am to them invisible, not here.
Too large to hunt, too aged to appear
on their homing screens as anyone to marry,
I am terrain, a rock they go around

like gaudy salmon climbing pouring streams.
They rise to take the bait of marketeers
and follow trends that they themselves began.
Extending plastic credit cards like claws,

they touch the gewgaws and occasionally buy
a scarf or purse or sweater they don’t need.
Then, swirling like Deinonychustic damsels,
they swarm away, and others take their place.

© Alan Reynolds, 2009 – 2016

Deinonychus. relatively small, fleet-footed, agile dinosaur discovered by John Ostrom of Yale University in the late 1960’s.