Gorillas? Thank You, I’ll Pass!

Gorillas? Thank You, I’ll Pass!

Please, oh please!
Let me never run into one,
Unless he is on TV,
An e-gadget,
Or inside a magazine.
Better yet,
In a menagerie,
Most preferably.

Even his much smaller kind
Is hostile in his squabble.

Oh, yes! We two siblings
Do still remember the battle
On that wet afternoon in 1961.

The entry of a supposed ‘Petting Zoo’
Outside a friendly German town
Is all where it started.

The back of my brother’s raincoat
Had suddenly left for the cage in strips.
The culprit was a seriously little monkey.
It must have waited to test his powerful grip.

I doubt that there were gorillas somewhere nearby.
Would any of us little escapees have wanted to reveal
A private compound for them?
No way!

Even if it were today,
I would shout out:
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just pass
Today, and any other day!”

Ⓒ hülya n. yılmaz, June 6, 2022

This ekphrastic poem is one of the three with which I have contributed to the July 2022 issue of The Year of the Poet, published by Inner Child Press International.