Elegies for the Departing
A poem
The river otter’s slick slip gone
from flow, from eddy’s gently pull.
Depleted numbers, one by one,
the vaquita’s small eye witnesses
demise by gillnet’s careless grasp.
Porpoise bodies like parentheses
enclosing empty waters. Reckless
rending of life’s fraying fabric, hues
extinguished. Mournful speakers address
remnants of the whooping crane’s lean retinue,
black rhino’s armoured avatars.
Dwindling arks within this xenodochium
of taxidermied relics. Irreversible scars
vein the encyclopedia’s fading pages,
bookish monuments to what somehow mars.
Our dull remembrance, missed aimless rages
for the missed leaps, the missed night rivers
of frog song stranded in this dark ravage.
Light’s frail scatter now only shimmers
through emptying frames where teeming thrived,
on far side of vitrine’s gleaming primers.
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