Previous

And sometimes crates of brutes
Would rip each other limb from limb,
And then they'd look at Noah, bust the crate,
And go for him!
Or sometimes it was peckish Noah, like some wild boar,
Who'd polish off the creatures, and be forced to go get more.
Plus it wasn't easy telling animals apart,
At least two thousand kinds of kindred rodents for a start!
Forty thousand spiders!
Eighty thousand snails and slugs!
Sixty thousand vertebrates!
A million kinds of bugs!
As much as thirty million species over all the planet,
But Noah soldiered on, with heart of gold and will of granite.

Shoebills, spoonbills, thorny devils, kangaroos and gnus!
Eyelash vipers, Jesus lizards, kakapos and shrews!
Beavers, boobies, dinos, dodos, bandicoots and crakes!
Dumbo rats, chinchillas, woodchucks, unicorns and snakes!

And oh! the things that Noah had to know a lot about,
Like how to tell a grizzly from a black bear by its snout!
And how to tell the difference between eighty breeds of cat,
And how to tell a wombat by its cubic wombat scat.
Koala bears eat leaves, he learned, but never eat the bark,
And as for tapeworms, squeamish Noah had to be the ark!
Still even though he had to know as much as his creator,
As huge as all his learning was, the danger was yet greater!

He had to capture vampire bats in guano-slicked abodes!
He had to know that suicidal ants will just explode!
He had to capture cheetahs
And get leashes 'round their necks!
He had to flip o'er hippos to identify their sex!
And just when Noah thought he must be done
Then God would say,
"Not yet—you've missed an aphid,
On a leaf,
In Paraguay."

Pythons, pufflegs, fruitbats, meerkats,
Penguins, blue-tongued skinks!
Turkeys, turtles, Fairy armadillos, Manx and minks!
Crocs, okapis, cockatoos and Red-necked Phalaropes!
Pronghorns, pandas, gobies, yetis, Bongo antelopes!

How happy Noah must have been with every beast aboard,
Sailing o'er the flooded Earth, a rainbow as reward.
And of three hundred kinds of dove,
He threw one off the boat,
To look for land (amongst the billion corpses now afloat),
And when the dove did not return,
He knew he'd found the shore!
But when the shore turned out to be
A mountain, Noah swore!
Oh why did God deposit him at twenty thousand feet,
Without a carabiner, or a crampon, or a cleat?

Next