Number ## in 30 in 30, a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (sometimes even in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing was inspired by XXX.

We imagine it as a giant rampage
this ancient shark

Ten metres longer than our own Great Whites!
(what that means to this American
is about nothing {it’s roughly 30 feet, dear}
but I’m told I could stand on its back
and its dorsal fin
would be my height
. . . well, not mine
I am quite small
Yours, maybe)

I suspect our assumptions and fears
come from its face
those jaws so full of
sinister teeth where death seems
inevitable

Perhaps we are mistaken
like with our own sharks
and in our fear
miss their beauty, their importance
to the ecosystem.
They have far more to fear from us
and their deaths at our hands are legion.

Our fears are better placed not in some
ancient, surviving mega shark
but in another Don
whose ego and evil
will bear no metric
and whose insatiable jaws
will claim all our lives

(if we let him)