Salamander Salvation

The sun would close those hidden caves
With mighty waves
Bright, rippled light
All day, no night

Consume those worlds before they’re born
Its torrid scorn
Most evident
In past worlds spent

But if born there, a world must flee
Escape, break free
Then always turn
To ease the burn

Then salamanders walking tall
No need to crawl
Just might evolve
With strong resolve

To venture out among the stars
That look like ours
To find a home
Where they could roam

In scattered leaves by mountain streams
A life of dreams
Most natural
Life pastoral

This is a response to Jane Dougherty’s Where salamanders swim, and it’s a
(two) Minute Poem ~ 3 stanzas with 8,4,4,4; 8,4,4,4; 8,4,4,4 syllable count (here, 6 stanzas)
                                    ~ rhyme pattern – aabb, ccdd, eeff
The image is from The Story of the Sun, Moon and Stars, by Agnus Giberne, copyright 1898, and can be found at archive.org. As an interesting aside, I also found the same image, without crop, at Project Gutenberg, as the frontispiece of a book titled The Astronomy of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, by Thomas N. Orchard, published in 1896.