This blog's poems are from my published poetry book Star Steeds and Other Dreams: The Collected Poems (CFZ Press: Bideford, 2009) and are © Dr Karl P.N. Shuker, 2009. Except for author-credited review purposes, it is strictly forbidden to reproduce any of these poems elsewhere, either in part or in entirety, by any means, without my written permission.

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Tuesday 1 June 2010

THE LOCH NESS MONSTER


Loch Ness monster (Richard Svenssen)


This wouldn’t be a book of mine if cryptozoology didn’t rear its head in it somewhere! So here, for mystery beast lovers everywhere, is a little snippet of crypto-history – the very first piece of writing that I ever penned (over 30 years ago!) in relation to the most famous cryptid of all. Nessie, this one’s for you!

THE LOCH NESS MONSTER


Through swirling mists of early morn,
Across the loch’s dull light,
A dark shape moves with hidden power,
Then disappears from sight
Beneath Loch Ness’s mirky cloak
Of water black and cold.
What lives in this vast underworld,
In Ness’s misty fold?

What creature thrives below the waves,
Beneath the surface grim?
What beast appears in photographs –
Obscure, opaque, and dim?
What creature gave the myths and tales
From bygone days new fame?
Of water horses, fierce, malign,
Which from the waters came,
To strike the hearts of every man
With terror of their forms.
The kelpies – dark, malignant ghosts,
And harbingers of storms.

So what gave all these legends life –
A creature huge in size,
With tiny horns and rhomboid limbs,
And glowing, deathless eyes?
A relic from the ancient past,
Disturbed by modern worlds?
It will be long, indeed, before
This secret is unfurled.

2 comments:

  1. As someone so (rightly) respected in the crypto world, I'd love to know what your theory is as to Nessie's identity? :o)

    I'm kinda keen on the Sturgeon one...

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  2. Hi there, Thanks for your kind words. What intrigues, and puzzles, me more than anything else re Nessie are the land sightings. Unless we assume that they are all hoaxes or very inaccurate/imaginative descriptions of something seen, the consistent morphology of the on-land creatures is that of a very large, long-necked, long-tailed, four-limbed beast that is therefore wholly unlike an eel, a sturgeon, or even a seal (thanks to the on-land creature's long tail). Even an otter lacks the long neck. In my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), I concentrated upon a plesiosaur identity (and hence have often, wrongly, been claimed by others to favour this identity), but the reason for concentrating on the plesiosaur identity in my book, other than the superficial similarity between plesiosaur and on-land Nessie, is that my brief for the book was to devote my attention only to identity contenders that would involve prehistoric survival, so that's what I did. In reality, however, the overall Nessie picture is much wider than that, and I think it likely that several very different animals have contributed collectively to the Nessie 'identikit', yielding a composite. Hope this helps. All the best, Karl

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