Iguana Love Poems

Dear heart,

You are precious things. My pretty hero extraordinarily shining your luminous truth.

You are my azure flame.

Yours sweetly,
Eyes

It's funny that little, romantic quip was basically made from a mad lib. After dissecting a piece of writing for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, I simply plugged them into a "formula" for a love letter. 

Dear [noun],
You are [adj.] [noun]. My [adj.] [noun] [adv.] [v.] your [adj.] [noun].
You are my [adj.] [noun].
Yours [adv.],
[Noun]

I chose to comb "The Iguana" from Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). It is one of my absolute favorite novels and I especially love the short stories within it. The story is about how the author coveted the iguanas' skin and wanted to use it for other pretty things. But after shooting one, she saw the once beautiful colors turn to grey. She compares this to when she saw a litter girl's leather and beaded bracelet and bought it from her. Like the iguana, she saw the colors and life fade from the bracelet once she put it on her wrist.

This excerpt is full of beautiful imagery and adjectives; however, being mainly about a big lizard, the nouns are not too romantic. So I had a thought to make this love letter from the perspective of the stone that the iguana sits upon: 

Dear Iguana,

You are luminous colours. My strange heap lively swishing your light blue skin.

You are my leather fish.

Yours nobly,

Stone

And for the sake of showing you this lovely little short story, you can find it after the jump.

Out of Africa - An Immigrant's Notebook

"The Iguana"

In the Reserve, I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.

Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.

Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet.

In the Zoological Museum of Pietermaritzburg, I have seen, in a stuffed deep-water fish in a showcase, the same combination of colouring, which there had survived death; it made me wonder what life can well be like, on the bottom of the sea, to send up something so live and airy. I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."

In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To the settlers of East Africa I give the advice: “For the sake of your own eyes and heart, shoot not the Iguana.”