…and she made some grandiloquent remark:
Coelacanth in the Mediterranean?
Ducks with bright copper rings tight around their necks.
They can?t swallow the fish they catch
diving from skows in the Indian or Asian sea.
They can?t eat, poor ducks, but for the very smallest of morsels,
but just you wait, you ducks, just you wait!
Soon when no one is looking, I will give you teeth!
Teeth to chew the fish into the very smallest of morsels!
Teeth to bite the hand! To bite back for freedom from tyranny
for democracy, for a full meal!
Soon those skows and dinghys and schooners and whatnot will be yours!
And toothed ducks will sail the Seven Seas.
There will be terror upon the face of the deep.
Ducks with teeth will resurrect the spectre of communism!
Skulls-and-bones will snap once more in the wind.