Dodo

Hans Savery, painting of a dodo (1651)

A quarry takes a bite out of a hill;

Shot whale turns belly uppermost; fake star

Intones an orbit; chimney sirens cry:

Labour is holy! Profit is better than prayer!

Fish in fetid rivers die;

Dodo is dead.

—Jack Beeching

"So what?" they say. "We’ll bring back the dodo yet.

It’s just a trick with DNA.

We’ve almost revived the woolly mammoth,

Tasmanian tiger, and dire wolf.

We'll resurrect the dodo, too, one day.

You wanna bet?"

"What use?" you cry. "What earthly use!"

"I’ll tell you what! Dodo by and by

May serve as totem for our ingenious race

When we’ve all gone off to a better place:

Dodos aplenty Elon’ll have on Mars.

They’ll play around his feet beneath the stars."

Jack Beeching epigraph from Penguin Modern Poets 16 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970). A fine historian and poet, Jack Beeching is, alas, all but forgotten today.

Sunday, May 11, 2025

Autoclave

Smoke rings rise from Mount Etna in Sicily, the tallest active volcano in Europe

An old order perishing, the first of many,

What price America? Apartheid? Liberalism?

Country music? Convoking humankind's

Scattered wits in her vast Autoclave,

To issue with pontifical steam first-class

Primate tickets in this self-promoting zoo,

Gaia blows an experimental puff or two.

Gaudeamus igitur! * The smoke is white!

Though selective evolution is the fix in sight,

Robed lobsterbacks' pious ranks give thanks

In the Sistine Chapel behind hermetic doors,

The key so big, lock resisting withered paws,

It's Darwin cures what hurt Earth abhors!

(A promisory outcome wanted by the banks.)

* Gaudeamus igitur! = Latin, "Let us rejoice!"

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Now and Then

Oh, God, make small

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.—T. E. Hulme

I thought—that’s if I thought of it at all—

I’d like the music of the future when it came,

But now it’s here and being sung

The song’s all wrong;

The singer’s got the  words confused,

And sings them like a cat with mange.

I did not suppose the sound of things to come would be so blasted strange!

Note: Artillery Lieutenant Tom Hulme was killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke in Flanders in September 1917. Lost in thought, he failed to take cover like those around him when it was heard coming.