ENDANGERED SPECIES^*

For a Whooping Crane that Died of Poisoning from lead Shot

 

PEGGY POND CHURCH

 

There were only a hundred of them left

anywhere in the whole world

where once thousands in their migrations

crowded the night sky:

that long white river of high sound

uncoiled from the throats of birds.

 

Then man came

swarming over the continents:

fire in his hands;

falcons at his wrist;

a quiver full of arrows;

then guns mean and hard

sowing death like a mocking phallus.

 

Not content with extinguishing birds,

man takes arms against his own kind—

“—he who cannot bring one green leaf into being,”

an offended goddess said. “Somehow or other

mankind must be got rid of.

Since he has destroyed all other preditors

I can do no more than let him

prey on himself till the last bone is stripped clean.

The weapons he has invented must destroy him.

Out of each violated atom he himself shall let loose

the fire of his own annihilation:

“After the fire, the darkness:

aeons of cold darkness.”

 

“Perhaps then,” said the goddess,

“I will once more smile upon the blind earth

and draw with the touch of my own skilled finger

a green cell out of the sea.

The green cell will start spinning the world again

from sunlight and long-unwakened water.”

“in time there will be music

from the throats of birds and of angelic creatures

I have not yet begun to dream.”

 

 

* Peggy Pond Church, Birds of Daybreak: Landscapes and Elegies, Santa Fe, New Mexico, William Gannon Publisher, Copyright @ 1985 by Peggy Pond Church, pp. 51-52. Reprinted by permission of the author.